Finance, Forex and Investments

Why are nations like China and India rising and Western economies slowing/retracting?

Communist nations like China and India are slowly coming out of poverty and improving the lives of their people. America and other western economies are slowing or, in some cases, retracting. Why is this happening? Could high prices of gas and raw materials be a factor, caused by high demand of China's and India's middle class?

Public Comments

1. forced sweat shop labour and directed career paths, China is exporting much more than it imports and it directs people to their career path smartest become scientist, engineers, and politicians while the none elites are relegated to lesser roles.
2. oil price has gone up because of demand. china and india require more and more all the time, while europes demand stays relatively constant. thus when price goes up because of demand things are tougher for us as the amount of expenditure stays relative to the number of people, while in rising countries more and more people require the fuel, so the price per person is cheaper for them compared to us. this is why they can sell fuel at petrol stations for less, because they have more citizens buying more of it. its economies of scale. western countries already have most people using fuels, so a price rise is a rise in real terms and cannot be distributed amongst poeple. so the west can do less business while the east does more. this then effects salaries as businesses spend more on energy costs, so they have to fire some people. it also means peoples salaries cant increase as before, so the cost of living increases, causing people to spend less in the economy. thats why the west retracts.
3. Lower cost of living in those countries EQUALS you can get away with paying peanuts to your workforce EQUALS more profit EQUALS more growth.
4. western jobs moving to where minimum wage is 1.00/day to increase their bottom line. that 1.00/day is great pay where we're talking about, here. they now have a middle class, where none has existed before. this puts (demand) pressure on all commodities. hence the food and fuel crises. slave labor and caste systems help too.
5. I think that only a small percentage of India's and China's population "are coming out of poverty" The main reason both these countryies economy's are booming in because they both have a HUGE pool of dirt cheap labor. European and American economy's are crashing basicallyy because we've had it too good for too long...and of course a bit of help from the GW BUSH admin...thanks george. ps. India is not communist.. last time I checked
6. This has happened before Years back Japan was said to become the ''wold banker'' Their minister of trade called Americans stupid and lazy The city of Tokyo was thought to be worth more than the whole state of Calif. They bought a golf course in Monterrey Rey Calif and said that they would only let Japanese tourist play it Than had to sell it for 50 cents on invested dollar The only thing that upsets me is we have never payed them back for this I have personally but our Gov has not
7. I guess the best comparison is a jar of water. If the jar is empty you can easily fill it with more water, but if its already full there is not really much more you can add. The West is, economically, already at its peak in per capita wealth. Increasing that further becomes more and more difficult without new technologies to lower the price of goods. China and India, on the other hand, have vast populations living in poverty, so they can accelarate upward much more quickly, simply because of how much room they have to grow their per capita wealth. If you draw a wealth graph its one of those types which rise steeply at first before levelling out. China and India lie on the steep part of the graph, whereas America and the West lie further along on the part where it levels out.
8. Ambition leads to Rise Rise leads to Power Power leads to Dominance Dominance leads to Complacency Complacency leads to Decay Decay of one leads to Ambition of others It's the way of things. The West became ambition long ago and rose up into the voids of unsettled and weaker peoples, dominating them. Once this was done, the West set about relaxing, always assuming there was more wealth to be had, as long as the machine ran itself. This behavior saw the decay in the West as the resources vital to our success became ever dwindling...since we now lacked the ability to seize more resources properly, and our governments too weak to make any type of intelligent decision regarding our tumbling economies, we decayed. Our decay allowed the East to rise up because we no longer have the power to impose our will on these nations like China. This is mearly the cycle of civilization-I don't know why people are so shocked about this, just open a history book.
9. I think it's very funny that Westerners always like to think "oh yeah cuz they are sweat shop labourers, they have advantages", but they seem to have forgotten that they were once sweatshops too, it is just part of the process of development. Please read up on 19th century Britain, there was not only sweatshops but child labour as well!
10. China's rise is not because of cheap labor as suggested above. India's labor is cheaper than China, but India hasn't risen as fast as CHina. And Africa's labor is cheaper than India, but Africa hasn't risen as fast as India.
11. B U S H