Among the general public in Europe, and even in the more informed sections, there is almost no realisation of how globalisation has adversely affected livelihoods and employment of the majority of the population in the developing world including in fast-growing Asian countries. The agrarian crisis is largely seen to be history, supposedly vanquished by the rising prices of agricultural goods in world trade between 2002 and mid 2008, even though farmers’ incomes continue to stagnate and cultivation is still barely viable in large parts of the developing world. Because of the volumes of manufacturing exports from Asia, there is still widespread perception of shift of manufacturing jobs from North to South - even though manufacturing employment has declined in the developing world as a whole, has barely increased in most countries of Asia and has actually declined since 1997 in what is generally accepted to be the workshop of the world, China.
(...) There is certainly some degree of truth in this – there is no question that current “Northern” standards of life cannot be sustained if they were made accessible to everyone on this planet. This means that future economic growth in the developing world has to involve more equitable and sensible patterns of consumption and production. But that hardly deals with the basic problem. Even if the elite and middle class of the developing world, and particularly China and India, just stopped increasing their consumption, simply bringing the vast majority of the developing world’s population to anything resembling a minimally acceptable standard of living will involve extensive use of global resources. It will necessarily imply more natural resource use and more carbon emissions.
(...) So the stark reality is that the developed world must, on the whole, consume less of the world’s resources and reduce its contribution to global warming absolutely. This in turn has effects on income as well. It is not immediately clear why rich countries with falling populations necessarily need to increase their GDP, and why they should not focus instead on internal redistribution and changing lifestyles, which could in fact improve the quality of life of every citizen.