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Hans Rosling: 200 years ago, United Kingdom was the leading nation in the world, both
with regard to health and average income per person. Look at my graph. Each bubble is a
country. The color shows the continent. The size of each bubble here is the size of the
population.
On the horizontal axis, income per person in inflation adjusted dollars. On the vertical
axis, life expectancy, the number of years a citizen could expect to live when they are
born in the country that year.
Now, you can see that United Kingdom was on top. And this is what has happened, during
the years first income started to grow. Slowly, slowly, also life expectancy became better.
At the turn of the century, the British people were living on an average, 50 years. And then,
the first world war were tough years. Between the wars, health improved and the economy
improved slightly.
After the second world war, then the rest of the world started to improve. Many countries
are catching up both in health and in wealth. This is your situation today, the United Kingdom
is just one of many rich countries. And big countries like China and India are catching
up. Whereas, some like Congo are as removed away as ever.
In the middle here, we see the emerging economies.
Let me make a special comparison during this 200 years between the United Kingdom and China.
What happened was that during the first 100 years, China had a negative economic growth
and the difference between the countries just increased.
Then China started slowly to have a little
improvement of health, and only with Modern China, and after the Big Leap that was a catastrophe,
China started to have good health and now in the last decades, fast economic growth.
Can you see that China is catching up? Yes,
indeed they are. Let me finish with a special graph where I have changed to put GDP per
Capita in dollars here on the vertical axis, to conventionally have a place for time on
the horizontal axis, 1809, 1909, and 2009, and with projections from the International
Monetary Fund, IMF, up to 2014.
Once again, this is what happened. China had a negative economic growth while the United
Kingdom had a positive economic growth. After the emergence of Modern China, the first decade's
economies, there were ups and downs. But, after Deng Xiaoping changed the economic system,
having steady economic growth, and faster than ever in the United Kingdom and China
is catching up, and will continue to do so throughout the crisis according to present
projections, whereas the United Kingdom is expected to have the same GDP per capita in
2014 as the country had in 2008.
This means in the coming five years, China will be coming closer at a faster rate than
ever. But, these are projections. Follow the change of the world at Gapminder.org.