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A story
by The Associated Press from
Beijing
says: “a 26-year-old woman worth $16.2 billion is
mainland China’s richest person, the business magazine
Forbes said Monday, topping a list of tycoons whose
wealth has soared amid a boom in stock and property
prices.
The
fortune of Yang Huiyan, also
Asia’s richest
woman, is based on shares in Country Garden Holdings
Ltd., a real-estate developer founded by her father,
Forbes said. It said the company’s Hong Kong stock
market debut this year made billionaires of Yang and
four other people.”
I
highlighted the above story because I believe that it
tells the story of the economic growth of the world as
we get well into the 21st century.
The last
10 years have been a time of immense upheaval bordering
on the chaotic. It all started with the Asian Financial
Crisis of 1997. But that was only the start and the
confusion and disruption has not stopped.
Look at
the Philippines. We started this century with perhaps
the greatest political crisis and challenge in decades.
The United States experienced an election debacle
unprecedented in the history of that nation. The major
terrorist attacks on the
United States,
Spain, England and Russia affect every person on the
planet.
The wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq directly or indirectly touch
everyone no matter what country they live in. Price of
crude oil and other commodities, such as gold and
foodstuffs, have never been any higher. And yet, the
wealth creation around the world has never been any
greater than it is now. We tend to look at events in the
very short term. What happened yesterday or last month
or last year. However, changes occur over a longer time
frame.
The
recent “scorecard” by the Asian Development Bank (ADB)
highlights that idea. “The Philippines has scored well
on 12 of 21 key human-development indicators under the
United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),”
according to the ADB’s latest review.
The
report noted that the Philippines was now halfway
through its target of reducing people trapped in extreme
poverty, those earning $1 a day or less, as the rate has
eased to 14.8 percent as of 2004 from 19.8 percent in
1999.
I know
that the ADB report will not satisfy many. But positive
changes are occurring, not only in the
Philippines
but also around the world.
Read
this: “Forbes magazine released its list of the 400
richest Americans today, and for the first time, it
takes more than $1 billion to earn a spot in the
rankings.”
And the
world’s richest person is from Mexico.
From
Forbes magazine: “Strong equity markets combined with
rising real-estate values and commodity prices pushed up
fortunes from Mumbai to Madrid. Forbes pinned down a
record 946 billionaires. There were 178 newcomers,
including 19 Russians, 14 Indians, 13 Chinese and 10
Spaniards, as well as the first billionaires from
Cyprus, Oman, Romania and Serbia.
By the
way, several Filipinos made the list of the “richest”
and a few more probably would have been there if not for
being so “shy.”
So the
question is: what caused all this global wealth creation
in the last decade?
The ADB
report about the
Philippines
gives some insights. “The Philippines has reduced
poverty at the national level, but did so more rapidly
for households, where the head had completed at least
primary education.” Education is the key to becoming
wealthier. However, it is not only education in the
traditional sense but access to information.
The last
10 years has seen an explosion of information being made
available through the Internet to people that have
always been marginalized in the “Information Age” that
began in the 1980s.
Further,
though, has been the explosion of respect and
encouragement for individual achievement. What you do
not find on the list of the richest, whether by
individual or nation, are those places where the
government controls the ability of the people to be both
creative and rich.
For
example, the people of
Russia
are the same people of the dead Soviet Union. Yet under
a capitalistic system, (from Forbes) “Russia
now has 53 billionaires, two shy of Germany’s total, but
they are worth $282 billion, $37 billion more than
Germany’s richest.”
All
around the world, fortunes are being made, as in the
case of the richest person in China, through property
and the stock market. Why? Because under a free-market
system, it is only through real-estate and the stock
market where a person has the ability to create wealth,
limited only by their own ability and financial
imagination.
Again,
look at the
Philippines.
The Shoemart group basically took an abandoned site of
the reclamation area of Manila Bay and turned it into
the largest mall in Asia. There are listed companies on
the Philippine Stock Exchange that are worth millions
and yet without the stock market the ideas for these
companies would have died on some banker’s desk for lack
of funds.
Welcome
to the 21st century and the Age of Wealth Creation.
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