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Is there a transfer of wealth between the west and east?

The shift in economic power from the West to the east is accelerating. The rich world will lose some of its privileges as a result. An example from history is the Quarry bank Mill. This is a handsome five-storey building set in the valley of the River of all in a small English village a few miles south of Manchester. It was built in 1784 by Samuel Gregg, a merchant, who found profit in supplying cotton thread to Lancashire's weavers. The raw cotton sheet for America's slave plantations was processed on the latest machinery, the water frame. Later the entrepreneur extended the factory and installed coal-fired steam engines to add to the water power from the original device. All this gave a huge boost productivity. In 1700 spinster with a pedal driven spinning wheel might take 200 hours to produce a pound of you. By the 1820s it would take around an hour.

The mill was part of a revolution in industry that would profoundly alter the world's pecking order.  the new technologies, laboursaving inventions, factory production, engines powered by fossil fuels and other similar technologies spread to other parts of Western Europe and later to America. The early industrial rises along with a few late developers such as Japan were able to login and build on their leading technology and living standards.

The great divergence between the West and the rest lasted two centuries. DeMille which was once one of the world's largest has become a museum. A few looms, powered by the mills waters wheel, still produce details Begin shop but cotton production has long since moved abroad in search of low wages. Now one is another historic change is shaking up the global hierarchy. A great convergence in living standards is underway as poorer countries speedily adopted technology know-how and policies that make the West rich. China and India are the biggest and fastest growing of a catch up countries, but the emerging market boom has spread to embrace Latin America and Africa as well.

And the pace of convergence is increasing. Debt ridden rich countries such as America has seen scant growth since the financial crisis. The emerging economies, having escaped the carnage with only a few cuts and graces, has spent much of the past year trying to check the economic booms. The International monetary fund forecasts that emerging economies as a whole will grow by around four percentage points more than the rich world both this year and next if the fund is proved right by 2013 emerging markets will produce more than half of global output, measured at purchasing power parity.

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