"The Shifting Global Balance of Power"
by
Professor Danny Quah
Professor of Economics and Co-Director of LSE Global Governance,
London School of Economics and Political Science
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LECTURE DETAILS ...

Speaker: Prof Danny Quah
London School of Economics and Political Science
Chairperson: Prof Euston Quah
Editor of Singapore Economic Review
Date: 25 April 2011, Monday
Time: 5.30 pm to 7.00 pm
Venue: LT 2, Level 2 (Education Wing),
Nanyang Executive Centre, Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

PROGRAMME ...

5.00 pm - Registration and reception
5.30 pm - Introductory remark by Chairperson
5.45 pm - Lecture by Prof Danny Quah
6.30 pm - Question and Answer session

REGISTRATION ...

Admission is free. Only 50 seats are available. To register,  please click here. For more information, please contact Ms Joey at 65922621or email kqkek@ntu.edu.sg.

ABOUT SER AND DISTINGUISHED PUBLIC LECTURES ...

The Singapore Economic Review was founded in 1956, being formerly known as the Malayan Economic Review. It is the second oldest economics journal in Asia published in the English medium. The Journal is devoted to the publication of high-quality theoretical and empirical papers on all aspects of economics pertaining to the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Being a peer-reviewed journal, SER has always adhered to the most stringent review process and international editorial conventions. The journal is subscribed by major academic institutions all over the world and has an international editorial board. The journal is indexed and abstracted in the Social Sciences Citation Indices, and is published 4 times a year by World Scientific, a leading international book publisher.  The editorial office is presently with the Economics Department at the Nanyang Technological University.

In 2002, the journal launched the SER Distinguished Public Lecture Series. The inaugural lecture was given by Professor David Greenaway, Vice Chancellor of the University of Nottingham, followed by Professor John Whalley from the University of Western Ontario and Professor Sir James Mirrlees from the University of Cambridge who is also the 1996 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Professor Arye Hillman from Bar-Ilan University and Editor of the European Journal of Political Economy. More recent distinguished speakers include Professor Robert Klitgaard, President of the Claremont Graduate University and Professor Bradford Delong, Professor of Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury and Professor Fred Singer from University of Virginia.

ABSTRACT ...

Sometime in 2010 China became the world ’s second-largest economy, along the way overtaking Germany, the UK, France, and all the rest of Western Europe. Today, the economic strength of China is exceeded only by that of the US. Soon too, however, this one-two ranking will almost surely be overturned in China’s favour. By some accounts China today already consumes half the world’s output of refined aluminum, coal, and zinc; and uses twice the quantity of crude steel as does the EU, the US, and Japan combined. India, the only other billion-people nation on the planet, has launched itself onto a similar growth path, after a half-century of moribund quiescence. The two giant economies now grow at a pace previously recorded only in easier-to-ignore, special-cased, tiny Far East Asian island nations. This emergence of the East has, in the last three decades, yanked the world’s economic center of gravity nearly 5000 km out of its 1980 mid-Atlantic location eastwards past Helsinki and Bucharest, onto a trajectory aimed squarely at India and China.

This is Rise of the Rest on a massive scale: What must the West do to respond?

To address many of these questions rigorously will take decades of economic history only now unfolding. For at least one important set of issues, however, a little evidence is already in to help us think through the problem.

There is, of course, always the possibility that the Rise of the Rest might, in truth, be only entirely beneficial to the West. Whether that eventually turns out to be the case, many policy-makers and observers now believe the opposite. But if the East does indeed provide a challenge for the West, the correct question is not what is good for the West or for the East, but rather what is good for the world as a whole. Take that alarmist scenario, that the West is overtaken in the next 10 years: How much would people in the West be willing to pay people in the East to prevent that? How much would the East have to be compensated to keep the West ascendant? [These hypothetical compensations, of course, don’t have to be literally carried out; we’re just trying to get a sense for the numbers involved here.] Or, how much of a disruption in the East’s development trajectory would the West consider justified for the West to remain Best? What is the tradeoff between, say, a 1%-point employment increase in the West versus an n% income gain in the Rest?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER ...

Danny Quah is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science; he is also Co-Director of LSE Global Governance, and Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS.  He currently serves on Malaysia's National Economic Advisory Council.  In 2006-2009 he was Head of Department for Economics at LSE.  Quah holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and was Assistant Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the LSE.
 
Quah was panelist on Sustaining Asia's Competitiveness at the Tianjin 2010 World Economic Forum Summer Davos Annual Meeting of the New Champions.  He has recently spoken on the global economy and global imbalances at the Khazanah Megatrends Forum, the Hay Literary Festival, the British Embassy in Beijing, the National University of Singapore, Xinhua News Agency in Beijing, and the Shanghai Futures Exchange, and in different forums in Bali, Abu Dhabi, Kazakhstan, and Mauritius.  In January 2011, he delivered a lecture on the tensions of international power restructuring in a shifting global economy, as part of the Ralph Miliband Series on the Restructuring of World Power.  Early in 2009 he delivered the Goh Keng Swee Lecture in Singapore on China's economic growth, and the World Economy Asia lecture ("Will Asia save the world?") in Kuala Lumpur.  In May 2009, together with Lord Charles Powell and Sir David Tang, he opposed Gurcharan Das, Deepak Lal, and Mark Tully, in debating the motion "The future belongs to India, not China" at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
 
Quah has consulted for among others the World Bank, the Bank of England, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore.  He is a Member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Economic Imbalances.
 
Prof Quah's research is now on the global economy, economic growth and development, income inequality, international economic relations, economic geography, and new technologies.  He is investigating in particular the eastwards drift of global economic activity, and the repercussions of such ongoing shift.  He has also previously worked in time series econometrics, inflation, and business cycles.  At the LSE he used to lecture in the largest course (Introductory Economics) taught in the School.  Quah now teaches macroeconomics and econometrics in LSE's MSc programme, and lectures on The Global Economy for the LSE-PKU Summer School in Beijing and LSE's Executive Summer School in London.
 
Prof Quah was born in Malaysia and is now a British citizen.  He holds a blackbelt in taekwon-do.