The economic rise of China and India should not be seen as a threat by the US and other rich nations but instead be welcomed, former US trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz said yesterday.
Prestowitz, founder of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington DC-based think tank, said that the integration of China and India into the global economy could benefit developed countries by providing them with cheap services and manufacturing and creating markets.
Trying to hold these countries back by impeding their exports will likely fail, Prestowitz said.
Blocking pointless
"Efforts to block imports from China or India are not going to work in the long run," he said. "We can all benefit from trade with developing nations, but all of this has to be handled by the leaders of all these countries in a sensible fashion."
He said that while the two countries face daunting difficulties, they are already making huge strides, with China heavily involved in high-tech manufacturing and India offering services ranging from cheap health care to various businesses over the telephone.
Prestowitz, speaking to the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan, noted that about 10 percent of Chinese and 10 percent of Indians are considered to be "highly skilled" -- or together about 230 million -- a figure that is close to the entire population of the US.
"It's true these are poor countries on average, but these are big populations," said Prestowitz, who served as a trade negotiator in the administration of Ronald Reagan.
"We've been talking about globalization for a long time, except half of the population has been left out. Now they're in," he said.
`Huge' problems
He also noted, however, that they both face "huge, huge" problems, from political uncertainty to poor infrastructure, rural poverty and corruption.
Should they fail to develop, he said, the sheer numbers of people involved could become calamitous.
"The failure of these countries implies hundreds of millions of refugees, SARS to the power of 10," he said.
"Who knows what kind of wars and weapons of mass destruction could result from this kind of failure on an enormous scale," he said. "We need to help these countries meet these daunting challenges, and if we do we can benefit."
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