I love how it's talking about china being #2, with a $1.33 trillion gdp, then it drops US's $14 trillion gdp, as if it's an easy to achieve milestone.
I have no fears that china will outpace the US, for a number of reasons.
I have no fears that china will outpace the US, for a number of reasons.
Don't come with the argument of, "oh they have all different governments and all different languages". State governments in the US hold a great fraction of legislative power (to the point where you're not a US lawyer, but a WA, TX or CL lawyer), and provinces in China have local languages (yes, languages - there's a point to using an ideographic writing system because you can use it for languages other than Mandarin) and not everyone speaks Mandarin.
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/10/23/when-it-comes-to-e-comme...
Generally no, from a consumer perspective. Perhaps I misunderstand what you refer to? There are some oddities, such as Switzerland not being in the EU which causes
The larger point is certainly correct: I would not consider EU a single economic entity at this point. It is progressing toward it, though, things such as the payment service/bank transfer unification are inevitably knitting the area together. As such it may be useful to include the union prospectively, if you will.
They almost did, $1.33 trillions is quarterly GDP, they need 20% more. They'll get that in a few years.
Resource exhaustion will become a soft limit pretty fast. I don't believe in Malthusian hard limits, but extraction and distribution systems may grow more slowly than demand even without hard resource limits.