China to pass US as top economic superpower by 2016

 

In this picture taken on June 21, 2012 shows workers building a car on the Geely Motors assembly line in Cixi, 50km from Ningbo in China's Zhejiang province. (AFP Photo/Peter Parks)

Source: Russia Today

http://rt.com/usa/news/china-us-economic-economy-373/

America’s days of economic dominance aren’t over just yet, but one international thinktank says it might come sooner than once thought. According to one group, China will have the biggest world economy by 2016.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) out of Paris writes in a new report that China will be the world’s leading nation in terms of economy in just four years’ time, with other BRICs nations likely to usurp the current top dogs during the next few decades as well.

“The next 50 years will see major changes in country shares in world GDP,” the OECD report released this week reads. “On the basis of 2005 purchasing power parities (PPPs), China is projected to surpass the Euro Area in a year or so and the United States in a few more years, to become the largest economy in the world, and India is projected to surpass Japan in the next year or two and the Euro area in about 20 years.”

Additionally, the OECD predicts that China and India will together have a GDP that will beat out that of the G7 nations by as early as 2025, and by 2060 they expect Indian to out-perform the US on its own.

"As the largest and fastest-growing emerging countries fully assume a more prominent place in the global economy, we will face new challenges to ensure a prosperous and sustainable world for all. Education and productivity will be the main drivers of future growth, and should be policy priorities worldwide," said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria adds in an accompanying statement published with the report.

Asa Johansson, senior economist at the OECD, says, "It is quite a shift in the balance of economic power we are going to see in the future." According to projections published in the report, the United States’ share of the global gross domestic product will shrink to 18 percent in 2030, then 17 percent three decades later. Currently, the US is responsible for nearly a quarter, but by 2060, India is expected to have a slightly larger economy, generation 18 percent of the world’s GDP, as Japan and the Euro zone lose influence in international finances.

Last year, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission predict that China’s yuan, or renminbi, could become the main reserve currency for the world economy within the next decade if it continues to rise up over the US dollar.

“Chinese economic dominance is more imminent and more broad-based – encompassing output, trade and currency – than is currently recognized,” economist Arvind Subramanian wrote last year. "By 2030, this dominance could resemble that of the United States in the 1970s and the United Kingdom around 1870. And this economic dominance will in turn elevate the renminbi to premier reserve currency status much sooner than currently expected.”

 

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The real jobs numbers 41 percent of America unemployed one third doesn't want work at all

 

33% percent of Americans don't have a job and don't want one

Source: Russia Today

http://rt.com/usa/news/jobs-us-employment-welfare-749/

Even if the US Labor Department has determined that the unemployment level has finally plateaued after months of staggering jobs statistics, the truth behind the numbers isn’t all that nice. Only four out of every ten adults in the US is employed.

While the percentage of Americans filing jobless benefit claims isn’t what it was during an unemployment epidemic that ravaged the country throughout the majority of US President Barack Obama’s administration, the Labor Department’s numbers are largely inflated on account of how they determine what actually constitutes looking for work.

Officially, the unemployment rate in America for the month of September was only 7.8 percent, but that statistic stems from only the number of citizens who have been actively searching for a paycheck. In actuality, only around 5 percent of the adult population in the US is unemployed in the eyes of the government because they have been handing in applications during the four weeks before the Labor Department conducted their research. Additionally, another 3 percent are interested in work but haven’t actively engaged in a job hunting during that span, roughly creating an unemployment figure of just under 8 percent.

The real figures, however, reveal a much scarier statistic.

"The employment-to-population ratio is the best measure of labor market conditions and it currently shows that there has been almost no improvement whatsoever over the past three years," Paul Ashworth, chief North American economist for Capital Economics, writes in a note to clients obtained by CNN. That figure, which accounts for the proportion of working Americans compared with the number of adults in the country, is a lot higher than 8 percent.

For now, 58.7 percent of American adults are working if the actual employment-population ratio is taken into consideration, leaving about 82 million, or almost 41 percent of people unemployed. Only 8 percent, however, are even interested in work, leaving 33 percent of Americans not only jobless — but in no desire for work.

"The ratio expresses more clearly how many people find working to be a 'good or attractive deal,'" Tyler Cowen, economist and director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, adds to CNN.

If the numbers seem drastic, it’s because they are. So rampant in fact is the country’s seeming disregard for work that other just released statistics show that funding welfare programs for the American population was the most expensive endeavor undertaken in all of Fiscal Year 2011.

Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee released findings this week showing that the government spent roughly $1.03 trillion on welfare programs last year, funding 83 separate efforts to provide assistance to Americans. Days earlier, a separate study out of Capitol Hill revealed that the number of people enrolled to receive federal assistance by way of food stamps has hit a new record high with roughly 47 million US residents.

“These astounding figures demonstrate that the United States spends more on federal welfare than any other program in the federal budget,” Alabama Sen. Jeff Session writes in a letter provided to The Daily Caller this week. “It is time to restore — not retreat from — the moral principles of the 1996 welfare reform. Such reforms, combined with measures to promote growth, will help both the recipient and the Treasury.”

“No longer should we measure compassion by how much money the government spends, but by how many people we help to rise out of poverty,” Sessions adds. “Welfare assistance should be seen as temporary whenever possible, and the goal must be to help more of our fellow citizens attain gainful employment and financial independence. This is about more than rescuing our finances. It’s about creating a more optimistic future for millions of struggling Americans.”

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