For more than 500 years, the West achieved global dominance, but it is predicted that in less than a decade, half of the world’s richest consumers will live outside of Europe, North America, and Australia and New Zealand, says Cameron Dean
In 20 years, 60% of the wealthiest citizens will hail from non-Western countries; mainly in the East, in China, India, and Southeast Asia. For the first time, the West won’t dictate the global market. Instead, it is reckoned the Indian Ocean will become the primary hub for sea lanes dedicated to trade, with a wealthy Asian continent shipping goods to prosperous city ports on the shores of the Arabian Gulf and East Africa.
At the same time, as the world’s citizens get richer and more educated, they tend to focus more on their own self-development, and have fewer children. The result over the past two decades has been a collapse in the birth rate of the global population.
‘Peak child’ and population growth
People panic when they think about overpopulation and crowding the Earth. After all, the world’s population is increasing — and very rapidly. But in this panic is a foolish assumption: that the population explosion will keep growing, inevitably. This fear is sometimes referred to as the straight line instinct, as rapid population growth is often represented on a graph.
But although the population is growing, the number of children being born has already peaked. The average number of children that women have, globally, is two. Which is slightly below the 2.1 replacement level.
This average number includes South Africa, Iran, China (which only recently announced its lowest ever fertility rates), Japan, and pretty much every country in the West. In 2020, India’s fertility rate continued to decline, reaching 2.2, or just above the replacement rate.
True, there are still some women who continue to have enormous families of six or seven children — but these women are a tiny minority of the world’s population. With more money, most parents concentrate on raising what few children they have as best as they can.
Today’s overpopulation concerns are the result of the fill-up effect. Birth rates were extremely high in the 1990s, but stopped increasing in the early 2000s. Imagine the world’s population as as filling bathtub, with the tap recently switched off. The population is still rising, but the number of children (the water) has already exited the tap. This means that, towards the end of the century, the number of elderly people will rapidly increase to nearly a third of the population. The global population should then start to contract once it reaches between 10 and 12 billion.
Western ignorance and global prosperity
Before you continue reading this article, ask yourself: Were you aware of the economic prosperity of the world described above? Not many Westerners are. In fact, studies have shown that even students score no better than chimpanzees when asked in multiple-choice tests just how astonishingly the world has developed in recent decades.
For example, since 1997, China’s absolute poverty rate has plummeted from 42 percent of the population to less than 1%. In fact, only one in seven people living today live in absolute poverty.
This ignorance to the economic development of Africa, Asia and beyond is actually hurting Western businesses who should be investing in these new and rapidly improving economies. Instead, what they are doing is sitting back and letting local brands establish their reputations first. Most people in Western nations think the world is getting worse, and its only Westerners who think that. Perhaps if they knew the opposite was true, they would be more open to opportunities in emerging economies.
A market waiting to explode
Population-growth, global prosperity, and ageing — all three of these trends are on a collision-course with the stark reality that these emerging societies have no structures in place to assist in the mobility of the infirm, the disabled, or the very old. In the long-term, drastic alterations of all walks of civil life will have to take place in order for these emerging societies to be age-friendly compliant. In many circumstances in Asia, it is difficult to get around even if you are fully fit. Stairs are very steep, not built with an ageing society in mind. And many roads — especially out of, but even inside the major cities — are simply inaccessible in electric wheelchairs.
In the shorter term, more accommodations will have to be made for younger citizens with mobility issues in what is almost certainly going to be a period that oversees rapid healthcare amenities and facilities’ expansion.
Here is just one example of a largely untapped resource, one undersold by ignorance in Western attitudes to the rest of the world. Think about it: in 2075, people over the age of 65 will number almost a third of the global population. In China alone, almost three decades sooner, there will be nearly 500 million people approaching 70.
What the future holds for the West, and the rest
The West will no longer hold all the cards by 2040 and may even start to bend to the will of Eastern influence — after all, it will be Easterners who will have the majority of the spending power, and disposable income, which therefore will dictate how the market develops. However, Europe and America will always be home to some of the world’s most prestigious research institutions and developers.
The West also has the benefit of hindsight — even if it doesn’t have the benefit of foresight at the moment. If it acts quickly, and sits up to take notice of the prosperity enjoyed by Easterners, it should be able to use its knowledge of already having an ageing population and accessible infrastructure to ease the Eastern world’s transition into fully developed societies. Ones accessible to all — young or old, able-bodied or disabled. And there will be plenty of money to be made in the process.
Cameron Dean is a Copywriter at Webster Wheelchairs, one of the NHS’s suppliers of wheelchairs, rollators, and other elderly and disability-friendly equipment.
