A 'moderately prosperous society' with no Chinese individual left behind - that's the vision for China set out by Chinese President Xi Jinping in a number of important speeches in 2017. 'Moderate' prosperity may seem like a modest goal for a country with more billionaires (609 at last count) than the US. But the 'China Story' is a complex one. The China Story Yearbook 2017: Prosperity surveys the important events, pronouncements, and personalitites that defined 2017. It also presents a range of perspectives, from the global to the individual, the official to the unofficial, from mainland China to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Together, the stories present a richly textured portrait of a nation that in just forty years has lifted itself from universal poverty to (unequally distributed) wealth, changing itself and the world in the process.
1. Can prosperity be disentangled from growth? / Dominique Meda -- 2. A high-stakes shift : turning the tide from GDP to new prosperity indicators / Isabelle Cassiers and Geraldine Thiry -- 3. Towards a transcultural definition of prosperity : insights from the capability approach / Stephane Leyens -- 4. Consumerism and positive liberty / Jean De Munck -- 5. Prosperity in work / Thomas Perilleux and Julien Charles -- 6. Out of the laboratory into the field : the stakes riding on a paradigm change / Gaetan Vanloqueren and Philippe Baret -- 7. Environment, growth, and prosperity : possible models of integration / Tom Bauler and Edwin Zaccai -- 8. Prosperity and the crisis of politics / Laurent de Briey -- 9. Collective action and the redefinition of prosperity : on the democratic governance of the transition / Christian Arnsperger -- 10. Conclusion : who will redefine prosperity? / Robert Boyer, Isabelle Cassiers, and Isabelle Ferreras.
For the people of Timor-Leste, independence promised a fundamental transformation from foreign occupation to self-rule, from brutality to respect for basic rights, and from poverty to prosperity. In the eyes of the country's political leaders, revenue from the country's oil and gas reserves is the means by which that transformation could be effected. Over the past decade, they have formulated ambitious plans for state-led development projects and rapid economic growth. Paradoxically, these modernist visions are simultaneously informed by and contradict ideas stemming from custom, religion, accountability and responsibility to future generations. This book explores how the promise of prosperity informs policy and how policy debates shape expectations about the future in one of the world's newest and poorest nation-states.
For most of humanity the third quarter of the century was a period of unprecedented prosperity. The world's output of goods and services, expanding 4 per cent or more annually, tripled in less than a generation. Growth seemed commonplace—and was soon built into consumer aspirations, corporate earnings projections, and government revenue expectations. Few stopped to calculate that if the 4 per cent rate of economic growth remained steady, there would be a fiftyfold expansion in just a century. And even fewer considered the pressure this would put on the earth's resources.
This short article offers a simple but profound alternative to the economic dogma of continually seeking to maximize profit and growth—seek instead to maximize personal happiness. Drawing on the work of Donella Meadows and others whose updated study, produced 30 years after the original Limits to Growth thesis that found existing economic policies and practices to be already unsustainable, the author cites Aristotle and thinkers from other cultures who proposed centuries ago that it was happiness not wealth or reputation that human beings truly desired. Recent international surveys of what makes people happy, and research into the theoretical consequences of expanding prosperity without material growth by reducing time devoted to work, are offered as examples of how educators and policy makers can act to raise general awareness that happiness is not linked to excessive wealth and that a sustainable environment combined with the optimum development of each individuals" mental, physical, and moral potential can in fact be achieved. There might be more professional economists in our society than people in any other profession. Yet, most of them appear to still accept without question the idea that growth is always beneficial. Conventional wisdom says that growth is essential to control unemployment and promote stability. As our current recession shows, when growth stops, demand falls, and business revenues drop, all leading to a reduction in levels of investment and the laying off of workers. In fact, as a nation's economy becomes more efficient, it actually generates more unemployment. At the same time, since most nations run their economies in deficit, there are strong arguments to support the idea that growth is needed to pay off our high levels of personal and national debt. These arguments are hard to refute. But the other side of the coin is: more growth necessarily brings leads to greater depletion of resources, and destruction of the environment, all contributing to global climate change and potential ecological collapse. The consequences of not limiting our growth—the "business as usual" route that our world is on—are so dire that it is high time we explore what might be done to limit economic and social growth while maintaining a functioning capitalist free market system. Though we have long recognized that there would be a limit to growth eventually, few macro-economic models have seriously examined just where that limit might lie. In 1972, commissioned by The Club of Rome, Meadows, Randers and Meadows of MIT compiled a study entitled: "Limits to Growth." 1 Using system dynamic theory and computer modeling, they produced a model called "World3." With this model they produced 12 different scenarios for Earth's future. World3 showed how the interaction of population growth and natural resource use necessarily imposed finite limits to industrial growth. The idea of such a limit was novel and somewhat controversial at the time and many, as expected, dismissed it as an alarmist doomsday prophecy. At that point in time, the world's economy with a global population at about 3.8 billion 2 was still comfortably within the planet's carrying capacity. Thus it seemed to many that the Earth still had plenty of room to grow.