Will China Continue to Defy Gravity?
In the last post, we discussed China’s astonishing economic growth over the last few decades. As a result, it is now the world’s second largest economy and continuing to gain on US. This is not just the size of their economy but also their overall confidence in the international sphere and challenging the West for […]
Will China Overtake US in This Decade?
Since the 1970s, China has been racing to become the world’s largest economy. This wasn’t obvious when China first began to open its economy with market reforms and consequently began to experience meaningful economic growth. In 2000, China’s GDP was just 11.8% of U.S. GDP. The country had recently launched a private housing market. It became […]
Why Did We Wait So Long To Invest in Infrastructure?
The recently passed infrastructure bill that aims to upgrade America’s declining infrastructure makes serious investments in many areas that have been under-invested in for decades. This is great news in many respects. It will improve our lives as we travel and use the roads, bridges, airports, railways, etc. It will make it easier for products […]
Finally, Investing in America’s Infrastructure II
The recently passed infrastructure bill is great news for the long-term productivity of American workers and wage growth for them. We looked at the transportation investments in the bill in part of this series and here we take a look at the rest of the elements in the bill. Needless to say, this is a […]
Finally, Investing in America’s Infrastructure I
In the last few posts, I have examined the impact of infrastructure spending on a country’s overall productivity and wages. We also looked at data that showed America’s investments in infrastructure are way down over the last few decades. It may be no surprise then that the growth in productivity over that time span has […]
What About Infrastructure? Part III
So far, in this series, we have discussed the importance of infrastructure investments on the overall productivity of the economy and its impact on wages and prosperity. We saw in a graphs that US has not invested nearly as much as it used to on infrastructure in recent decades. This has happened at a time […]
What About Infrastructure? Part II
Every year, the US spends more than $400 billion on public infrastructure. But annual infrastructure funding routinely falls short of capital and maintenance requirements, contributing to deterioration of the country’s infrastructure assets. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave US infrastructure a grade of D+ and estimated that an additional $2.1 trillion […]
What about Infrastructure? Part I
One of the key building blocks of a healthy and growing economy is top notch infrastructure. What is infrastructure? Well, these days we have heard a lot of debate about this and it’s a worthwhile topic to examine. In the old days, infrastructure was nothing more than roads and bridges that horse-carts could run […]
Setting the Stage for the 21st Century Dominance Part VI
Once upon a time, enthusiasts designed a formal education system to meet the economic demands of the industrial revolution. Fast forward to today and, with the current global economic climate, it seems apparent that the now established education system is unable to meet the needs of our hyper-connected society – a society that is in […]
Setting the Stage for the 21st Century Dominance Part V
So far in this series, we have tackled the issue of industrial policy and how it can impact a country’s prospects. Industrial policy can mean that a country’s government has a vision and a plan to support that vision. This vision and plan should support how the country views its place in the world and […]