Some of the vulnerabilities result from growth itself. Development makes a society more mobile, more demanding, and better educated and informed. It also changes the nature of the demands: richer people naturally seek a degree of personal autonomy and engagement in public life. Their concerns also change: China’s income per head is now at levels that have spawned powerful environmental anxieties elsewhere. Thus, a revolution of rising aspirations, reinforced by the new information technologies, constrains what a government can hope to get away with, even in a one-party state.
That is from this interesting article by Martin Wolf where he discusses if rapid-growing emerging-economies will be able to pull ahead the world economy. Emerging economies are also vulnerable, he argues. Wolf does not really talk much about the innovation that can come out of these emerging economies, which might have important world-wide spill-over effects. We are witnessing a reconfiguration of economic structure. The competitive advantages of countries are being redefined.
Wolf asks:
An important additional question is whether sustained growth of emerging countries might pull the high-income countries out of their current sluggishness. The answer is: no. [I am not so sure, it seems he is answering the question too fast . . . ]
