The world in 2024 [View all]

DECEMBER 22, 2023
ENGELSBERG IDEAS
THEMES: GEOPOLITICS
Experts look ahead to 2024 and outline what they believe will be the most important geopolitical developments of the coming year.

Linda Yueh, Economist at Oxford University and London Business School and author of The Great Crashes: Lessons from Global Meltdowns and How to Prevent Them

2024 is the biggest year for elections in history. Over half of the world’s population, some four billion people will go to the polls. There will be elections in the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, India, Taiwan, among many others, including in Africa. The potential policy changes that could result make next year a year characterised by geoeconomic uncertainty, that is, where economics will be greatly impacted by geopolitics. When this is layered on top of a weakly growing world economy with volatile inflation, 2024 is replete with uncertainty.

S. C. M. Paine, William S. Sims University Professor of History and Grand Strategy at the US Naval War College and author of The Wars for Asia 1911-1949

While the new Cold War persists, global growth rates will not match those of the inter-Cold War period. After the last one, Russia ceased funding armed groups, China focused on economic growth, so civil wars died down and wealth compounded. Now Russia and China, joined by Iran regionally, are funding armed groups and propping up dictators globally, with growth-killing consequences.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have ‘unlimited objectives’ for the international rules-based order. Invading neighbours signals plans, not to reform (a limited objective), but to replace it. However flawed the rules are, negotiated improvements are far less wealth-reducing and life-destroying than wars to rewrite them.

Dictators regard democracies as existential threats, because citizens choose their leaders and prosper, while dictators haemorrhage cash to dominate citizens and neighbours alike. This is the essence of Xi’s Taiwan problem and Putin’s Ukraine problem.


Much more here

https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-world-in-2024/

Multiple Essays from experts in geopolitics.