Dubai: The world is witnessing an “epochal global rebalancing”, with the rising of new powers: China, India, Brazil and Russia (known as BRICs nations), a UN report released on Thursday said.
Today, developing nations are driving the economic growth and lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and placing billions more into a new global middle class, said the report prepared by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
“There is a ‘south’ in the North and a ‘north’ in the south,” the Human Development Report 2013 – The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World – said, adding that “the rise of the South is unprecedented in its speed and scale”.
“Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast,” it noted.
The rising nations paid more attention to sustained investments in education, health care and social programmes.
As examples of the growing role of the south, as a whole is in “driving the global economic growth, and social change for the first time in centuries.”
The report noted that developing countries hold today two-thirds of the world’s total $10.2 trillion (Dh37.51 trillion) in foreign exchange reserves, including more than $3 trillion (Dh11 trillion) in China alone.
The report anticipated that the combined output of the three leading economies – China, India and Brazil – will surpass, by 2020, the aggregate production of the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada”.
