Global Trends 2030

The US intelligence community has suggested that by 2030, India, along with China, will straddle global commerce and dominate the world economy amid gradual decline of the west.
A new report says India will surge ahead after 2020 even as China begins to wane or decelerate, mainly on account of demographic changes which will see China aging before India.
“'Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”, a report issued by the US National Intelligence Council—the brains’ trust of the US intelligence community—says China has powered ahead, but India’s turn will come after 2015.
But by 2030, Asia “will be well on its way to returning to being the world’s powerhouse, just as it was before 1500”. Pakistan will be a no-show and may not even exist. It says, “In 2030 India could be the rising economic powerhouse that China is seen to be today. China’s current economic growth rate—8-10%—will probably be a distant memory.”
The report says the total size of the Chinese workingage population will peak in 2016 and decline from 994 million to about 961 million in 2030. In contrast, India’s working-age population is unlikely to peak until about 2050.
But both China and India, it says, face the prospect of being trapped in middle-income status, with their per capita income not continuing to increase to the level of the world’s advanced economies, unless they resolve their resource constraints (mainly water, energy, food) and invest more in science and technology to continue to move their economy up the value chain.
The landmark US intel report released on Monday says the “current Islamist phase of terrorism” might end by 2030. However, violent terrorism might evolve into bloodless forms of economic and financial terrorism, it says. The report has a dismal prognosis for Pakistan, widely considered the epicentre of terrorism.
Although the report said South Asia would continue to face internal and external shocks in the next 15-20 years, it saw New Delhi’s “power advantage” relative to Islamabad growing rapidly. India’s economy is already nearly eight times as large as Pakistan’s; by 2030 that ratio could easily be more than 16-to-1, it said. Pakistan does not even find mention as a second level economy such as Colombia or Egypt that the report counts in a list of middle tier that will also rise by 2030.