Outside In | The world should wake up when China finally says no to being the global refuse dump

I have talked often in the past about China’s “deflationary gift” to the world economy over the past three decades. But there is a second, huge and undiscussed “gift” – China’s “environmental gift”, or more specifically China’s “waste disposal gift”.

There has been wide recognition of China’s remarkable rapid economic emergence since 1980, which has radically altered the balance of the global economy – a balance over the past two centuries that involved a necessarily poor majority of the world’s population producing and selling foods and raw materials cheaply to about 500 million people in Europe and North America.

At the same time, there’s been recognition that as China became the “manufacturer to the world”, it not only destroyed thousands of low-paid, low-value-adding jobs in the US and Europe -- much to the alarm of Donald Trump and his supporters in the US -- but reduced inflationary pressures in the consuming West, enabling retailers year after year to offer “stuff” more cheaply, and enabling Western workers to stretch the spending power of their wage packets further than otherwise possible.

Of course, from 2001 when Beijing began to lift minimum wages to give Chinese workers more spending power and to create China’s own middle class consumer economy, this era of China’s “deflationary gift” began to unravel.

Few have yet begun to estimate the impact of the reversal, as Western retailers have found it increasingly difficult to keep consumer prices down.

Nor have they begun to calculate the additional pressure on consumers following the 2008 global economic crash, since when real wages in the high-consuming West have flatlined.