Prof Kishore Mahbubani, distinguished Fellow, Asia Research Institute and Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, has predicted a shift in economic power from the West to Asia in the first half of the 21st Century,.
In a keynote address 4th edition of Barbarca Ndiaye annual lecture organised by the Afreximbank recently, Mahbubani said that with the second half of the movement would be into the Afro-Asian Century. The Ndiaye Lecture was organised at a time of major tectonic shifts around the world and the choice of the main theme “Africa and the Remaking of the New World Order” reflected these developments at the global level.
“From the year one to 1820, China and India were the two largest economies of the world. It is only in the last 200 years that Europe took off, followed by the United States. In contrast to the plight of the bottom fifty percent in the United States today, the bottom fifty percent in China have had their best forty years of socio-economic advancement in four thousand years of Chinese history,” said Professor Mahbubani, a world-renowned geopolitical thinker and veteran diplomat. “In the 1990’s, China decided to become more pragmatic and the West decided to focus on ideology,” stated Professor Mahbubani.