New Delhi: The USA will no longer dominate the global markets in the 21st century as the economic centre of gravity will shift to Asia which will produce over half the world's income, a top UN official says.

"The 21st century will overturn many of our basic assumptions about economic life. The 20th century saw the end of European dominance of global politics and economics. The 21st century will see the end of America dominance," writes noted economist Jeffrey Sachs in "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet".

"New powers, including India, China and Brazil, will continue to grow and will make their voices increasingly heard on the world stage," says Sachs, who is a special adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals.

"The challenges of sustainable development -- protecting the environment, stabilising the world's population, narrowing the gaps between rich and poor and ending extreme poverty -- will take centre stage.

Global cooperation will come to the fore.

The very idea of competing nation-states that scramble for markets, power ad resources will become passe," he says.

In the book, Sachs analyses and addresses the great, interconnected, global challenges of the 21st century. A series of cascading threats to global well-being -- the most significant being environmental degradation and rapid population growth -- bear down upon our increasingly crowded planet.

All of them are solvable, Sachs argues, but potentially disastrous if left unattended.

According to Sachs, this century's global cooperation won't be led by a single country.

"It will be based on global agreements and international law, first and foremost as contained in the treaties and agreements that constitute the Millennium Promises. Financial contributions and ideas will come from many quarters, not only the rich countries but also a host of emerging markets and powers, including India, China, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa, among others," he writes.   

Sachs says India's challenge is to transform a densely populated sub-continent of subsistence farmers into a modern and largely urban society.

"Millions of people live in poverty. India's population tripled between 1950 and 2000 from 350 million to one billion. In the past two decades, India has finally achieved a long-awaited development breakthrough.

"A big boost of agricultural productivity in the 1960s and 1970s, supported by international science and door assistance, began to transform large part of subsistence-farming India into commercial agricultural regions. Gradually in the 1980s and then rapidly in the 1990s, several urban centres became internationally competitive in exports of manufactures and information-based services.

Fertility rates came down and literary rates rose, and both trends helped to strengthen India's economic transformation. Yet with 70 per cent or so of India's population still living in villages, and with profound ecological stresses, India continues to face an enormous challenge of development and transformation," the book says.

Sachs says changes in technology shift the particular advantages of geography and also eliminate certain geographical barriers altogether.   

"Today, a major non-coastal city such as Bangalore can export knowledge-based services to world's markets via internet without having to worry about access to shipping routes," he writes.

According to Sachs, India is yet another example that is frequently cited as self-made development, whereas, in fact, external assistance also played a critical role.  

"The colonial era bequeathed to India some vital infrastructure, especially the rail system, which served India in crucial ways during its recent economic takeoff."  He says India's Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was strongly supported by external assistance.  

"Though India has wonderful indigenous scientific capacity, the Rockefeller Foundation's support for improved wheat varieties also was crucial. Two great scientists -- Norman Borlaug of the Rockefeller Foundation and M S Swaminathan, India's director of wheat research in the 1960s -- teamed up to disseminate the improved seed varieties developed by Borlaug in Mexico and selected for applicability to Indian conditions by Swaminathan's team.

Their work took on special urgency after back-to-back droughts in 1964-65, which required India to rely on massive shipments of emergency US food aid."  

Borlaug's message to India was that there was need for a mass scale-up of high-yield agriculture, supported by strong and consistent government guarantees to farmers of fertilizers, high-yield seeds, credits and guaranteed sale prices for output.  

"In a 1968 speech, Borlaug declared, "I wish I were now a member of India's Congress; I would stand up out-of-order every few minutes and shout in a loud voice: What India needs now is fertilizer, fertilizer, fertilizer, credit, credit, credit, and fair prices, fair prices and fair prices!"

Source : PTI