The Real Asian Tiger

Excellent and thoroughly convincing article on the Seeking Alpha news site...

...if you thought China was, if not the snake (or dragon) in the grass at least the heir apparent to the world no. 1 spot, then think again, Ed Dolan, the contributor argues.

It was India all along. The primary reason in short is demographics. Whereas the fully 'developed' countries such as the US and Japan have a high dependency ratio (i.e. a large number of non-working people who depend on the working population) due to their ageing populations, and the developing countries also have a high dependency ration, but at the other end of the age spectrum (i.e. a large number of children) India is in the 'goldilocks' period in between, and enjoys a lower dependency ratio. I haven't fathomed out yet why ths period is named after the famous children's nursery story, but in any event this is crucial, Dolan argues, to becoming a major economy in the new, G20 world. China on the other hand is already leaving this goldilocks period to join the ranks of the ageing population countries.

Large populations aren't always a good thing of course, they need to be managed properly, but then again neither are rapid changes in fertility rates and here India scores highly over its northern/eastern neighbour again, since China's drop in fertility rate was very rapid (in no small part due to the famous one child policy introduced in the 1970s) whereas India's was much more gradual, and it still has a higher rate than China. Thus the demographic chart is likely to look a lot smoother in India's case.

There are other factors too of course - India is a democracy, more or less, China is not. The fact that English is widely spoken there (as opposed to Engrish) presumably also holds in its favour and, yes, I'm afraid I'm going to have to say it now, as an ex-pat (never would have dreamt of such a thing when I was at home) India was under British rule, whereas only one small part of China (er,...the best part) was, for any length of time anyway.

Don't take my word for it, check out the article here.