World Boom Ahead: Why Business and Consumers Will Prosper - Softcover

Kiplinger, Knight

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0938721704 ISBN 13: 9780938721703

Publisher: Kiplinger Books, 1999

Synopsis

The 21st century will bring rapid and tumultuous change in global markets, the workplace and the structure of business.

About this title

Review:

When you call a book World Boom Ahead, you make it abundantly clear that you're not expecting to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding into Washington or Tokyo anytime soon. How good does Kiplinger expect things to get? He sees two more decades of 1990s-like growth for the U.S. economy, with continued low inflation and increasing productivity. He sees the rest of the world starting to catch up to the economic prowess of the wealthy West, with the biggest developing nations--India, China, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia--doubling their share of world GDP, to about 16 percent.

Still, Kiplinger, editor in chief of Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, manages to keep his optimism bridled. Wherever there's a dictatorship or corrupt government, economic prosperity will be put on hold. And, of course, regional wars will still flare up. In other words, Kiplinger sees a world a lot like this one, only more prosperous globally. But even if the predictions in World Boom Ahead aren't particularly startling, the analyses backing them up are worth the time it takes to read and digest them. For example, in a section on why U.S. savings rates are low relative to other nations', Kiplinger notes that savings tend to decline when people feel confident about their economic future. In another section, he shows that taxes have remained about 20 percent of the U.S. GDP since the end of World War II, contrary to the idea that there has been an ever-increasing tax burden in the late 20th century. Part celebration of the achievements that put us in such prosperous times, part analysis of why those good times should continue, and part economics lesson, World Boom Ahead is a consistently fascinating look at our fiscal present and future. --Lou Schuler

From the Inside Flap:

Deepening financial crises in Asia and Russia. .. Turbulence in the U.S. stock market... The Y2K computer bug... A widening U.S. trade deficit with China... Labor shortages and narrowing profit margins in many industries.

After seven years of economic expansion and soaring stock prices, some dark clouds are forming on the horizon. Do they presage a severe storm or just a passing shower?

In World Boom Ahead, business journalist Knight Kiplinger looks beyond today's headlines - and the choppy waters just ahead - at the broad outlook for key industries, demographics and world markets. His conclusion: "The world stands on the threshold of a long, strong surge in economic growth and living standards, unprecedented in world history."

The driving force of this expansion, Kiplinger says, will be the dispersal of technology, resulting in a sharp increase in worldwide productivity. In the developing nations, a vast new global middle class will be both tough competitors and avid customers of the advanced nations.

Knight Kiplinger is editor of The Kiplinger Letter, America's leading business-forecasting publication, and editor in chief of Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine. In his last two books - The New American Boom (1986) and America in the Global '90s (1989) - Kiplinger and his staff offered a bold vision of a resurgent U.S. economy in the 1990s. These judgments ran counter to pessimistic popular sentiment when published, but they turned out to be remarkably prescient. Entrepreneurs and investors who relied on Kiplinger's forecasts have prospered mightily in the long expansion that followed.

Now, in World Boom Ahead, Kiplinger broadens his lens to the next two decades. It is a vision of rapid and tumultuous change in global markets, the workplace and the structure of business. There will be accelerating advances in telecommunications, biotech, new materials and energy. The next century will be fraught with pitfalls for the unprepared - but rich in opportunities for those who see the changes coming.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kiplinger Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0938721704
• ISBN 13: 9780938721703
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 404