Will Robots Kill the Asian Century?

John Lee

April 23, 2015 

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/will-robots-kill-the-asian-century-12703 

OWEN HARRIES, the first editor, together with Robert Tucker, of The National Interest, once reminded me that experts—economists, strategists, business leaders and academics alike—tend to be relentless followers of intellectual fashion, and the learned, as Harold Rosenberg famously put it, a “herd of independent minds.” Nowhere is this observation more apparent than in the prediction that we are already into the second decade of what will inevitably be an “Asian Century”—a widely held but rarely examined view that Asia’s continued economic rise will decisively shift global power from the Atlantic to the western Pacific Ocean.

No doubt the numbers appear quite compelling. In 1960, East Asia accounted for a mere 14 percent of global GDP; today that figure is about 27 percent. If linear trends continue, the region could account for about 36 percent of global GDP by 2030 and over half of all output by the middle of the century.