Homi Kharas - Mentions and Appearances

The change in China's global market share of income as a percentage of the world's economy is happening much faster than it did for any country ever – faster than the UK in the industrial revolution, than the US in the 1920s, than Japan in the 1950s. When you add the disruption of China to that of India you are looking at change six to 10 times faster than these other historic transformations.

There's a far greater concentration of wealth than there is a concentration of income. And that actually has quite a separate effect and impact on the economy.

For the first time, a major economy is saying: We will be better off doing things by ourselves, and making our own decisions. And that's a bit of a shock to the system.

A period of uncertainty and volatility is not good for the global economy, and what is not good for the global economy is not good for developing countries.

While economic growth is an integral part of poverty alleviation, it must be 'broad-based and inclusive.'

You have more and more middle-income countries now. They are larger economies, but the channels from which they can borrow have gone down. So these countries are stuck.

The damage of [President Obama's canceled Southeast Asia trip] is not irreparable. At the end of the day, these are just meetings. I think the question is more one of credibility – that credibility, trust and confidence in the U.S. ability to engage on a sustained basis. That’s a difficult thing to try to recover once that sense of the guarantee that the U.S. will always be there starts to erode.

One can never tell when one bump will be the bump that will really knock you off-kilter. In the grand scheme of things, I think [President Obama's canceled Southeast Asia trip] is a small bump, but it is nevertheless a bump.

The whole objective of the pivot was to try to say that the U.S. views Asia as a really important partner and will continue to devote high-level political attention, but what’s been happening is that there are other demands on [President Obama's] time. From the perception of Asia it raises the question, ‘Maybe they want to, but can they in practice?'

In today’s world we have many more development stakeholders, so there’s no need for a single agency to try to do everything. It’s far better to try to do some things and to try to do them really well.