India & China took less time to double economic output: US

India and China - the two leading emerging economies - are experiencing roughly 10 times the economic acceleration of Industrial Revolution, a top American official has said, noting that this is resulting in tectonic shifts in global commerce. The Assistant Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, Michael Camunez said while Europe took two centuries to double its economic output per person, US took 50 years, India and China - each having more than a billion population - achieved it in 16 and 12 years respectively.

"The Industrial Revolution, hatched in the mid-1700s, took two centuries to gain full force -- Britain, the revolution's birthplace, required 150 years to double its economic output per person; in US locus of the revolution's second stage, doubling GDP per capita took more than 50 years," Camunez said in American National Standards Institute. "A century later, when China and India industrialized, the two nations doubled their GDP per capita in 12 and 16 years, respectively," he said.

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Moreover, Britain and US began industrialization with population of about ten million, whereas China and India began their economic takeoffs with populations of roughly one billion (each), he said.

"Thus the two leading emerging economies are experiencing roughly ten times the economic acceleration of the Industrial Revolution, on 100 times the scale -- resulting in an economic force that is over 1,000 times as big," Camunez said.

Camunez said according to a recent report of McKinsey Global Institute by 2025, the consuming class will swell to 4.2 billion people. Consumption in emerging markets will account for USD 30 trillion -- nearly half of the global total."

This is consistent with recent World Bank and IMF forecasts, which predict that about 95 per cent of consumers and up to 90 per cent of world GDP will take place outside the territory of the United States in the coming decades, he said. "And this rapid growth, as you know, is not limited to the so-called BRICs -- Brazil, Russia, India and China. Indeed, six of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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The fastest growing economy in Europe last year was Turkey. The fastest growing market in the EU was not Germany but Poland. And this says nothing of the Southeast Asian economies and their white hot markets," he said. The US official said there has been tectonic shifts in global commerce, "the rise of new and thriving economies in emerging markets around the globe, and the imperative that has created for American industry to engage more than ever in foreign trade."

Camunez warned that by failing to work together, the US risk enabling emerging economies like China and India, with their enormous and growing internal markets, to set standards that can be imposed, by shear market share, on the industry and consumers.

"So these standards issues will remain, for some time, at the forefront of our trade policy negotiations," he said.