Globalisation
Global security and economy: executive summary
Global security and economy: what are the significant emerging issues?
Authors:
Publisher:
Strategic Foresight Group, 2008
This executive summary seeks to identify emerging issues that will have an impact on global security and economy during the next decade. The authors assert that as global issues are interlinked a major development with respect to one issue can drastically upset calculations on all other fronts.
The summary details five key emerging issues - identified on the basis of impact potential and probability:
- Prosperity of the periphery: will prosperity be concentrated in urban centres, coastal areas, and certain other privileged geographies or will it spread to the periphery?
- Competitive extremism: gradually replacing the threat of terrorism, but creating a much, much larger monster in its place
- Rise of multi-polarity: The United States will still continue to occupy the centre-place but will see its role as a single great power being replaced by a multi-polar world driven by the resurgence of Russia, China, Iran and independence of the European Union
- Global financial crisis: The financial imbalances between major debtor and creditor nations pose the risk of the collapse of the global financial system
- Water scarcity in emerging economies: may put breaks on growth, create food insecurity, have a destabilising social impact and impair the world economic growth.
The authors also detail a number of other significant emerging issues, including:
- Since rich countries will experience an ageing problem and poor countries will have youth bulge, innovative global policy tools, including managed migration, will be significant
- The concept of sovereignty of state is undergoing change due to assault from above and below and due to voluntary surrendering of sovereignty at the horizontal level
- Energy security: As not only hydrocarbon resources but also uranium reserves face the risk of depletion in the next three or four decades, energy security, already in pubic discourse, will occupy a much more significant place in global politics
- Fear of pandemics: The sensitivity of political leaders to the fear of one or more pandemics breaking out globally is expected to be heightened. Will such a pandemic ever happen crippling the world economy or will the fear divert health budgets from chronic diseases affecting millions of people to an unknown future disease that might never threaten humanity in any case?
