Emerging Third World powers: China, India and Brazil

Abstract

China, India and Brazil have become world economic powers; they are attempting to harness the forces of globalisation so as to strengthen their international standing in multilateral institutions like the WTO. Theirs is not a surrender to imperialism, but an attempt to build a bulwark against it, from which they can implement their own national strategies for development — strategies that are qualitatively different from those followed by the non-aligned movement after Bandung. While each country is pursuing a somewhat different path, their collective might within the G-20 is already forcing concessions on trade, agriculture and subsidies from the US and EU. But do such growing South-South economic linkages have the potential to transform the global balance of power?

The BRICs, US ‘Decline’ and Global Transformations

“…Robinson (2004: 99) contends that transnational capitalism has led to the erosion of a global North-South divide and that this "particular spatial form of the uneven development of capitalism is being overcome by the globalization of capital and markets and the gradual equalization of accumulation conditions this entails." As a result of this equalization, reflected in part in the rise of the BRICs (Harris 2005), "(w)orldwide convergence, through the global restructuring of capitalism, means that the geographic breakdown of the world into north-south, core-periphery or First and Third worlds, while still significant, is diminishing in importance." (Burbach and Robinson 1999: 27-8) This argument was central to the wider debate over globalization, and the extent to which hyper-mobile capital had escaped the constraints of comparatively immobile nation states and labour (see Ohmae 1994;Held et al 1999).…”

Awarding Sustainable Asia-Pacific Hotel Practices: Rewarding Innovative Practices or Open Rhetoric?

“…Yet, the UNWTO's (2010) forecast for 1.6 billion international tourists by 2020 is founded mainly on expectations of continued rapid growth in Asia. China and India, in particular, are expected by 2020 to have travel-hungry middle classes numbering in the hundreds of millions (Bussolo et al 2007;Harris 2005).…”

A new Bandung?

“…Shanghai's GDP of $80 billion is equivalent to the GDP of Hungary, Chile, and Pakistan to take just one indicator of scale [14]. The opening of China and India to the world market has led to a decline in the prices of labor-intensive goods and services in relation to commodities; to a greater intensity of relations between states of the global South; and to massive shifts in the global distribution of income and wealth.…”