Water's future in a borrow-and-build economy

摘要

Where will the world find growth over the next decade? It is a big economic question, but one which will ultimately shape the future of water, and it is therefore something worth asking at the beginning of 2020. There are two big challenges which governments around the world are hav-ing to contend with. The first is the fact that most of the productivity gains are delivered by a small number of highly profitable and globally successful com-panies which pay their elite staff well, while leaving the mass of unskilled and semi-skilled staff no better off than they were in the 1970s. The second is that manufacturing jobs, which have histori-cally provided the bedrock of demand in advanced economies and the pathway to economic development in low- and middle-income countries, are increas-ingly being monopolised by China. This situation is likely to persist even as China moves towards becoming a high-income economy. The combination of rock-bottom capital costs and the scale of the operations that it has been able to achieve make it difficult to compete with China from any direction.