Goddamn, Taiwan is the second last with 17% increase in the same 30-year period. 😵
Meanwhile GDP per capita PPP has gone up 370%.
india’s didn’t seem to move at all
such a great case study on what happens when you split a society with one part being run by communists and the other by capitalist
b.a.w.c.?
big ass wiccan cock?
but at what cost?
The real question is whether the buying power changed.
This is going to sound strange, but a major problem in the world economy is the lack of Chinese consumer spending. It is at least ten percentage points below non-US developed countries and is a major reason for the trade imbalance between China and the rest of the world.
It has been suggested that the Chinese government increase its retired health care benefits to include more money for emergency events as, currently, a large chunk of that cost gets paid by the retirees.
It does say it accounts for inflation, but Poland is the only country on the list that went from low income up to high.
What gets lost in the Poland success story is the scale of the Western financial intervention in the early 90s. It wasn’t just a few loans. The US alone kicked in nearly a billion dollars in grants and aid right out of the gate to stop the economy from collapsing. Then 200 million for the Polish Stabilization Fund in 1990 that made their new currency actually work. But the really big one, the thing no other post-communist country got on that level, was the debt forgiveness. The Paris Club, with the US leading the charge, straight up cancelled half of Poland’s official government debt. We’re talking about wiping clean 50% of a 30 billion dollar tab. The US forgave about 2.4 billion of the 3 billion Poland owed it. That was a massive, deliberate financial reset button.
So when people talk about Poland’s climb from low to high income, the real story is that the climb started on a foundation built with hundreds of millions in direct grants and one of a kind debt haircut orchestrated by the West. They did the hard work, for sure, but they were able to do it standing on a mountain of forgiven debt and direct cash that simply wasn’t available to others in the same way.
Interesting! Thanks for telling me about it.
