Posted on 05/07/2008 8:09:50 PM PDT by blam
China to leapfrog Britain in household wealth
Last Updated: 10:47am BST 07/05/2008
Chinese households will have the third greatest spending power in the world within a decade, leapfrogging their British counterparts.
Barclays Wealth and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) ranked China's total household sector spending power at number seven in 2007. The UK was ranked third.
But in a global forecast released today, Barclays and the EIU will say China's booming economy will propel it to number three by 2017, just ahead of Britain at number four.
Although the figures are skewed because China is so populus, it is also noteworthy that India will join the Asian tiger in the top 10 as wealth continues to flow east. The US and Japan are forecast to remain at numbers one and two respectively for household wealth, but Australia will be forced out of the top 10 by India's ascent.
"The most important development over the next decade, according to our research, is the rapid escalation of household wealth in the key emerging markets of China, India, Russia and Brazil," said the EIU.
The index, based on the cumulative dollar net worth of all the households in each country, is also forecast to show a big rise in the number of millionaire households. Last year, seven countries - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the US and Britain - all had more than one million households worth more than $1m.
During the next decade they will be joined by five more - Spain, the Netherlands, Australia, Taiwan and South Korea.
China already has the densest concentration of millionaire households through Hong Kong, where 26.4pc of households are dollar millionaires. Hong Kong and Singapore are expected to still top the table in 2017.
So lets see, the population of the UK is about 61,000,000. The population of China is about 1,322,000,000. So in terms of wealth per capita, it takes nearly 22 Chinese citizens to match the wealth of one UK citizen.
And we are supposed to be impressed?
Or did I read it wrong?
No, I think you’ve got it right.
Must be a slow news week. One of the most idiotic articles I’ve seen recently.
They obviously are not talking about per capita wealth. But, if they are looking at total wealth of the nation, as you have pointed out, it doesn’t mean a lot. Ridiculous article.
Knew Hong Kong was rich, but that rich?
Where’s Russia?
That (amount) suprised me too.
Luxembourg's per-capita might be several times more than the Chinese numbers. But which government has more resources available to purchase more weaponry? And which country is actually a bigger threat? The one with the bigger per-capita figure?
But China will have the per capita AND the population to boot.
I have to say though, I find it rather difficult to believe that China is going to increase it’s wealth by more than 22 fold and overtake Britain in terms of per capita wealth within the short space of 10 years. That figure would also assume that the British economy would remain stagnent the whole time, which it probably won’t....
That’s not the point.
Every Chinese pays a portion of his income towards taxes. It’s those taxes that fill the coffers that will pay for China’s military. With the size of their population and the amount of taxes collected from each, China can pay for a rather competitive military- and over the years, a point will come when the Chinese have a better military than the British, even with a lower per-capita income. The size advantage overtakes the per-capita advantage.
I doubt they will be able to achieve the same qualitative advantage over the British military, and even if they do, Britain has no vital interest to protect in that part of the world since Hong Kong was handed over back in ‘97, so there will be no solo war against the Chinese. Any war involving Britain vs China will almost certainly involve the US as the chief protagonist, so the qualatative advantage is all that matters...
That depends. When exactly did America get into WW2, and why?
What’s your point? Britain is not going to be involved in any military altercation with China that does not also involve the US. I cannot forsee a single plausible scenario that would not also involve the US....
Actually the whole discussion got distracted all along. My first reply was to the other poster saying, “And we are supposed to be impressed?”, regarding China’s per-capita income.
I argued that low per-capita doesn’t matter, in a military sense, if the population is gigantic. “Thousands of drops make an ocean...”
You then mentioned that if China and Britain were to get involved in conflict, America would step in. I just said that past precedents don’t always support that assumption.
Case-in-point (I will have to check again): America’s late entry into WW2. Besides, to what extent was Britain involved in Vietnam? Further along, what about the Falklands War?
Countries don’t go about protecting alliances- they protect interests, and interests change with time.
UK’s population is just as many as one of China’s 30+ provinces.
Actually, the kind of scenario I was envisaging involved Britain coming in to back up the US, say over an invasion of Taiwan for instance. I’m well aware that there is no such thing as friendship amongst nations, only interests.
Britain has no interests in that area of the world anymore that do not also involve the US. Quite simply, there is nothing over which Britain would go to war with China for that would not also give cause for the US to go to war....
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