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Europe vs. Asia vs. The West? Some people might think that this is off the wall. However, please read this post and provide your opinion. If you divided the world into three competing super power areas, Who do you think they would be and who do you think would be the most powerful? Would it be the United States or China or an amalgamation of the countries of Europe? Perhaps India and the African countries? Who will win the economic War?

Hopefully there will not be a real world war, because then we all lose. Mankind would be sent back to the dark ages, so we will ignore this scenario in this post.

Grouping of Countries

If you lumped North and South America together and called them the “West”. If you lumped all of the European countries together and called them “Europe”. This includes Russia and the countries that made up the USSR along with some of the Muslim countries. And then you have Asia which encompasses China of course, the Koreas and even Pakistan.  Africa and India and the middle East are a collection of countries that might go one way or the other or even form a fourth group. Australia would probably try to adhere to the West initially, but not last long. It would succumb to one of the others economically.

Europe vs. Asia vs. The West – Economic Alliances

I am not talking about war in this post, nor am I talking about domination of one group over an other. What I believe is gradually happening, and it might take 100 years, is that these groups of countries will form into economic alliances. They will come  with supporting war machines that will dominate their part of the world. They will compete with the rest of the world. Right now we are all aiming for open international trade, open skies and all of that stuff, but I believe that is only temporary.

The west is simply trying to make money from the emerging populations that are moving from poverty into middle  class. They want to sell their products and goods to this class of people who are beginning to have money to spend. This represents huge market opportunities in China, India and Pakistan were there are more people than the rest of the world put together. As their purchasing power increases, the potential for market profits is staggering. Sure the west and Europe is leading the charge right now, but that will and is changing to self supported markets and profit.

Will we Mature In Time

These countries will mature over time and take back or find a way to retain the profits within their own countries. They will not lose it to investors in the West or in Europe. Simple business economics will dictate that the profits be re-invested in the economies that the products are being consumed in and it will happen one way or another. The West will have to sit back and perform on its own economy and not depend on jobs that produce goods for other countries.

In fact it is already happening. After every recession, we can count on the number of jobs lost to foreign countries from the US and Canada. Never to return, unless we lower our pay scales and make it more attractive for companies to stay here. We currently enjoy a high standard of living, however as the world becomes more global, two things are going to happen:

• First, the global standard of living is going to decline to the standard of living enjoyed by the large masses of people in the over populated countries. Their standard of living is increasing from poverty to just above poverty and,
• Secondly, the group of super rich will get larger and hold increasing wealth, even more than what we already have today.

Europe vs. Asia vs. The West – Next Steps

Is there anything we can do about this shift in wealth and economic power from the West to Asia? The old saying probably applies, “If you cannot beat them, then you had better join them”. This is the current path that the world’s leaders seem to be on. Is this correct , how knows, but it is a far better approach than being isolationist rattling our guns.

Sure there will be a lot of pain as people who had blue collar jobs that paid well are laid off, lose their jobs and approach the poverty level. We all have to start re-educating ourselves no matter how hard it is so that we can compete on the world stage.

We will probably add more posts about this subject in the future. But for now, we would really appreciate your opinions and thoughts about what is going on! For more posts about future trends, click here.

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