How Asia Can Shape the World: From the Era of Plenty to the Era of Scarcities

Asia will redraw the map of economic progress over the next twenty-five years. Growth is necessary to solve economic and social problems, but harder to achieve as the age of plenty gives way to the age of scarcities. The challenge opens the doors for an Asian economic model based on shifting of productivity for the individual to groups, ecological productivitiy instead of economic productivity, and a reversal to traditional Asian values - less materialistic than Western values. A new paradigm for economic thinking emerges to replace the one launched in the West 200 years ago.

Jorgen Orstrom Moller is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.