Long-term scenarios play an important role in research on global environmental change. The climate change research community is developing new scenarios integrating future changes in climate and society to investigate climate impacts as well as options for mitigation and adaptation. One component of these new scenarios is a set of alternative futures of societal development known as the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). The conceptual framework for the design and use of the SSPs calls for the development of global pathways describing the future evolution of key aspects of society that would together imply a range of challenges for mitigating and adapting to climate change. Here we present one component of these pathways: the SSP narratives, a set of five qualitative descriptions of future changes in demographics, human development, economy and lifestyle, policies and institutions, technology, and environment and natural resources. We describe the methods used to develop the narratives as well as how these pathways are hypothesized to produce particular combinations of challenges to mitigation and adaptation. Development of the narratives drew on expert opinion to (1) identify key determinants of these challenges that were essential to incorporate in the narratives and (2) combine these elements in the narratives in a manner consistent with scholarship on their inter-relationships. The narratives are intended as a description of plausible future conditions at the level of large world regions that can serve as a basis for integrated scenarios of emissions and land use, as well as climate impact, adaptation and vulnerability analyses.

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The roads ahead: Narratives for shared socioeconomic pathways describing world futures in the 21st century

The 2013 Human Development Report – "The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World" – examines the profound shift in global dynamics driven by the fast-rising new powers of the developing world and its long-term implications for human developmentChina has already overtaken Japan as the world's second biggest economy while lifting hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty India is reshaping its future with new entrepreneurial creativity and social policy innovation Brazil is lifting its living standards through expanding international relationships and antipoverty programs that are emulated worldwideBut the "Rise of the South" analyzed in the Report is a much larger phenomenon: Turkey, Mexico, Thailand, South Africa, Indonesia and many other developing nations are also becoming leading actors on the world stage

Human Development Report 2013. The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World

From Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals

A meta-analysis of burnout with job demands, resources, and attitudes

The region has been transformed by these developments, changing from a set of countries that rapidly integrated with the world to one that is also aggressively exploiting the sources of dynamism that lie within Asia. But countries in East Asia now face the domestic side-effects of rapid growth driven by international integration: congestion, conflict, and corruption. The challenge now is to complement global and regional integration with domestic integration. This requires ensuring vibrant cities that are not only linked to the outside world but also well-integrated domestically, strengthening social cohesion and reducing inequality, and providing clean governments which efficiently reinvest the economic returns that accompany fast growth.

An East Asian renaissance : ideas for economic growth

The shift in global goods production towards Asia is well documented. But global
consumer demand has so far been concentrated in the rich economies of the OECD. Will that also
shift towards Asia as these countries get richer? This paper defines a global middle class as all
those living in households with daily per capita incomes of between USD10 and USD100 in PPP
terms. By combining household survey data with growth projections for 145 countries, it shows
that Asia accounts for less than one-quarter of today’s middle class. By 2020, that share could
double. More than half the world’s middle class could be in Asia and Asian consumers could
account for over 40 per cent of global middle class consumption. This is because a large mass of
Asian households have incomes today that position them just below the global middle class
threshold and so increasingly large numbers of Asians are expected to become middle class in the
next ten years. The paper explores how this can help sustain global growth in the medium term,
driven by product differentiation, branding and marketing in the new growth markets of Asia.

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The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries

The risks of falling into the Middle Income Trap have increasingly become a focus of discussions on the long-term economic and social development prospects of developing countries. These risks, and how to minimize them, are being debated at the highest levels of policy making in some of the fastest growing emerging economies, even while these countries remain a source of envy to the rest of the world. The term Middle Income Trap is by now also being widely used in economic literature as well as business-oriented media. We draw satisfaction from the fact that some of our previous writings (Gill and Kharas, 2008; Kohli et al. 2009) (co-authored with other colleagues) seem to have helped popularize this term. At the same time, we realize that some have interpreted and used the term quite differently from what we had in mind when we first introduced the term Middle Income Trap in our writings and presentations. This article offers our perspective as to what the Middle Income Trap is, why so many countries fal...

What Is the Middle Income Trap, Why do Countries Fall into It, and How Can It Be Avoided?

ON AUGUST 17, 1998, a little more than a month after an international package of emergency financing and economic reforms was announced, Russia was forced to devalue the ruble.(1) Russia also declared its intention to restructure all official domestic currency debt obligations falling due to the end of 1999 and imposed a ninety-day moratorium on the repayment of private external debt, to aid its commercial banks. The moratorium also applied to these banks' obligations from short positions on currency forward contracts, as well as margin calls on repurchase operations (repos) with foreign banks. Less than three weeks later, on September 2, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) floated the ruble. By September 9 the exchange rate had reached 21 rubles to the dollar, more than three times the 6.29 rubles to the dollar that had prevailed on August 14. The free fall of the ruble and the disruption in the government's access to market borrowing were costly, with an output decline, bank failures, and a spike in inflation. Russia ended 1998 with an output contraction of 4.9 percent for the year, compared with initial expectations of slight growth. Inflation for the year as a whole was 84 percent, compared with an original target of 8 percent. On the political front, the reformist government of Sergei Kirienko was dismissed in the wake of the devaluation, leading to fears of policy reversals and a return to hyperinflation. In an effort to avoid these economic and political costs and achieve asoft landing for the economy, a $22.6 billion international financing package to support fiscal and structural reforms had been announced on July 13. The package was designed to maintain the preannounced exchange rate band while buying time to implement what were recognized as difficult and time-consuming reforms, through an injection of liquidity into reserves and a swap out of short-term ruble treasury bills (called GKOs) into long-term Eurobonds.(2) The objective of the swap was to address the rollover risk from the maturing of large volumes of GKOs each week, totaling $32.7 billion over the last seven months of 1998. It was envisaged that the announcement of the package would stabilize the market, reduce real interest rates to levels the government could afford, and take the pressure off the exchange rate. Indeed, GKO yields halved the next day but remained in excess of 50 percent, far above the 8 percent inflation target. By July 24, upon completion of the GKO-Eurobond swap, GKO yields had jumped to 66 percent, and they kept rising until the August 17 devaluation. Two factors apparently underlay the decision not to abandon the exchange rate band. First, for the Russians, the attainment of single-digit inflation in early 1998 (twelve-month inflation dipped below 10 percent from February until July) represented a major policy achievement, one that they would abandon only with great reluctance. Second, the recent East Asian experience with devaluation had been bad, especially in Indonesia. During the crises in some of those countries in 1997-98, attempts to float had precipitated free falls of the currency, damaging exposed banks and corporations as well as reducing output and raising inflation, and imposing large welfare costs. As a result, there was strong motivation in the Russian case to try and maintain market sentiment and access until fiscal and structural reforms could deliver results. This soft landing scenario implicitly underpinned the international package, which also recognized that Russia's fiscal and structural problems admitted no quick fixes. The package did not achieve its objectives. Total foreign exchange resources, including reserves and new external borrowings, used to defend the ruble between the first speculative attack in late October 1997 and the September 2, 1998, decision to float the currency amounted to $30 billion, about one-sixth of postcrisis GDP.(3) Russian-era foreign currency debt of the federal government increased by $20. …

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An Analysis of Russia's 1998 Meltdown: Fundamentals and Market Signals

The story of Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state Andhra Pradesh, is truly inspiring for late-comers to development. Within two decades, Andhra Pradesh has been catapulted straight from a poor and largely agricultural economy into a major service center. It has transformed itself from a lagging into a leading region. Fuelled by an increase in service exports of 45 times between 1998 and 2008, the number of information technology companies in Hyderabad increased eight times, and employment increased 20 times. Service-led growth has mushroomed in other parts of India and South Asia as well. Indeed, growth in the services sector has enabled South Asia to grow almost as fast as East Asia in this century, with growth of just under seven percent annually between 2000 and 2007. Growth rates in South Asia and East Asia have converged. The two fastest growing regions in the world, however, have very different growth patterns. While East Asia is a story of growth led by manufacturing, South Asia has thrived on service-led growth. The promise of the services revolution is that countries do not need to wait to get started with rapid development. There is a new boat that development late-comers can take. The globalization of service exports provides alternative opportunities for developing countries to find niches, beyond manufacturing, where they can specialize, scale up and achieve explosive growth, just like the industrializes. The core of the argument is that as the number of goods and services produced and traded across the world expand with globalization, the possibilities for all countries to develop based on their comparative advantage expand. That comparative advantage can just as easily be in services as in manufacturing or indeed agriculture.

Homi Kharas

Papers

An East Asian renaissance : ideas for economic growth

The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries

What Is the Middle Income Trap, Why do Countries Fall into It, and How Can It Be Avoided?

An Analysis of Russia's 1998 Meltdown: Fundamentals and Market Signals

The Service Revolution in South Asia