Eurafrica E-Book

Diego Masi

• Herausgeber: Fausto Lupetti Editore
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

EURAFRICA: CAN EUROPE SAVE ITSELF BY SAVING AFRICA?
Today the USA, China, and Europe divvy the world up and own about one third of it each.
In 30 years, things will change and Europe will decline and be weaker.
Demographic growth - the main cause of economic development - will highly increase only in Africa, but there, economic growth will be irrelevant.
Therefore, world development will be stuck, as it will grow little.
This century is going to drastically change the world.
Not only economic development will be blocked, but we are going to live the new Cold War between the USA and China, the migration tensions, a greater poverty and inequality, a technological revolution, an endless urbanization, a changing work, people getting older, a crazy climate and a broken middle class.
The hegemonic strategy of China - which will start to abandon Africa - will try to take pieces away from Europe in the name of the Eurasia dream, while the USA will try to create troubles to Europe with their isolationism.
Europe’s decline is sealed, and this will be the core of the world crisis.
Therefore, here is an idea against all trends: a process to create an agreement to make Europe come into play again, by saving Africa.
European people are wealthy, old, and anaemic, while African people are poor, young, numerous and rich in raw materials.
We could create Eurafrica, a way out not to assist, but to create a real African market to limit migration flows and give a future to Europe which will be able to have the same chances as the other world's leaders.
A political intuition having all data to support it.

All royalty rates will go to
Alice for Children
in Kenya.

Diego Masi, Communication entrepreneur, former member of Italian Parliament and Vice Minister for Internal Affairs in charge of Immigration.
For the last 14 years he has been living between Nairobi and Milan and he has been chairing Alice for Children by Twins International, an NGO founded with his wife Daria to help Nairobi’s vulnerable children living in Kenyan slums. He also founded Agricola Pro Bono, a charity dealing with the delivering of food to Milan’s soup kitchens.
He wrote Go Green; Expo 2015-the challenge; From predators to entrepreneurs, a book about modern CSR and Exploding Africa in 2018.

Leseprobe

DIEGO MASI

EURAFRICA

CAN EUROPE SAVE ITSELF BY SAVING AFRICA?

LETTERTO A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD BOYABOUT GLOBALIZATION’SFUTURE

Management and editorial staff

Via del Pratello, 31 - 40122 - Bologna

Tel. [phone]

Viale Abruzzi, 84 - 20131 - Milano

Tel. [phone] - P. IVA 06088550964

Official website

www.faustolupettieditore.it

Distribution Messaggerie Libri

Anvur - Registered publisher

(Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del sistema Universitario e della Ricerca)

ISBN: 9788868743024

PEOPLE WHO HAVE

WORKED ON THIS BOOK:

DAVIDE CELIO

FOR THE COLLECTING AND

THE ELABORATION OF DATA

ANNALISA MARINONI

FOR THE EDITING OF

THE FIRST DRAFT

SISSI DECORATO

FOR THE EDITING OF

THE FINAL DRAFT

CLAUDIO TOSI

FOR THE GRAPHICS

AND LAYOUT

TOMMASO CATONE

FOR THE COVER

EURAFRICAIndex

CORONAVIRUS,A foreword to the foreword

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYWHICH WORLD?

For Tommaso.Born in a century of complete change

1 The beginning of a changing world.From nation states to geo-poles

2 Cold War and Eurasia.The next twenty years’ new realities

3 1970 - 2020. The happy gestation

4 2020 - 2070. The world big chill

5 The eight future transformations

6 Europe. The sleeping beauty that must be woken up

7 Africa. An exploding continent

8 African politics. The real disease

9 Africa. The impossible quality of life

10 Africa. Poverty’s riches

11 Africa. Migrations will increase if…

12 EURAFRICA: How to transform the invasion into a market

Appendix 1ALICE FOR CHILDREN.Working inside slums for poor children.

Appendix 2Elaboration of data. Sources and reflections.

Bibliography

CORONAVIRUS.A foreword to the foreword

Coronavirus swooped down like a hawk on a planet thinking to be in control of everything.

It could not be spotted by any radar and by now it has caused about 200,000 deaths and 3 million ill people. Maybe these figures will be twice or thrice as much because statistics are not so reliable for many reasons. Even this humble book must deal with this virus.

Pandemic has been brutal and inhuman, and we must cry for its victims, because they were victims of a real war. In a blink of an eye it killed our society’s memory, that is our elders.

They were a great part of those people who modern treatments had taken care of and whom we look at with pride and egoistic hope.

It showed how much our science made of AI, biotech, machine learning and so on is useless while facing a viral micron which our antibodies didn’t know.

It was up to old medical ability and knowledge to find possible solutions using old medicines.

It showed that even in Tweets’ era it takes long to create a vaccine and that while waiting, life can completely change.

Moreover, it showed how a bat’s virus ended up inside another animal’s body and then inside a Chinese person can create a chasm in every country’s affairs.

This is the virus’ legacy.

A financial, economic, and social torment, even more severe than pandemic itself.

A human tragedy turns into an economic,health and work crisis

A chasm which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) quantifies as a 3% world recession, which is 9% in Italy, one of the most affected countries in the world. Between the two percentages there are all other countries.

It beat the world workforce hard and left millions of people at home with no incomes because the well-known welfare is a few western - especially European -countries’ invention.

For all the others there is nothing but poverty.

You cannot work and so you cannot earn anything.

And this is true in Africa, Asia, South America and eventually in the United States.

However, the virus has only worked as an accelerator of a recession which already existed and which we are going to analyse in this book.

Our world had already stopped its growth if compared with the past 50 years.

The virus has been like the crisis’ notary: it has highlighted and worsened it.

Covid-19 will soon become the alibi and for some time also the absolution for a group of leaders who have not lived up to a changing world’s challenges.

The pandemic has showed a hesitant and unstable political class - except for few cases - which was often panicking and under the health world’s protection.

I take two ridiculous - but dramatic - examples: Boris Johnson’s herd immunity - before he got ill - and Trump’s disinfectant’s injections.

Only dictatorships have been apparently efficient, but the mark for all leaderships is extremely negative.

Who is going to pay for this devastating pandemic?

After the fear for the virus and the trust in governments showing the way out, the middle and the poorest classes will wake up even poorer than before.

This will be the main victim of the virus: a group made of millions of western people, the economy’s backbone, which was damaged by globalization, change of work paradigm and technological disruption.

Then lots of big and medium-size companies will pay, the ones which didn’t keep up with modern times and which will be knocked out by financial losses and loans – which will not be able to restore obsolete organizations. Finally, the virus will beat lots of little companies - especially trade companies - because no subsidised loans could help them to open again.

These problems will cause an unfixable unemployment.

Damages will be great and will affect the next five years with a slow growth - which was already predictable -, showing how much capitalism as we created it falls apart.

However, problems always have a double face and opportunities will be many.

Geo-politics strengthens

China, the USA, and EU are keeping strong and are now strengthening their roles as the three big geo-poles whom all others spin around.

China, strong because of its dictatorship, seems to be the fittest.

It quickly defeated the virus - which was born at their home - and it started to move again by giving a few of information, but by using a strong and clear propaganda, pretending to cooperate and to show solidarity.

However, it is fragile, and its weakness will be shown in the end.

Europe - the fellowship’s prey - stopped being the sleeping beauty and suggested instruments to make a recovery and an improvement of its economy and politics possible. 27-Europe’s GDP will decrease by 7.5% by the end of this year, but it has showed - after moments of uncertainty - it has a great sense of the geo-pole.

The European Central Bank has provided 750 billion euros, eliminated the stability pact and the interdiction of helping companies, created Sure - 100 billion euros - to support countries’ layoffs, allowed the European Investment Bank to loan some money – 200 billion euros - for infrastructural investments, downgraded the ESM - 240 billion euros - for helps to health assistance and finally - after some on-a-gain, off-again discussions whose we still don’t know the details - has allowed the European Commission to provide between 500 and 1,500 billion euros supported by a trade Recovery Bond through its budget.

That is not a real debts’ sharing but it is something similar. Anyway, Europe is loaning money in many ways, and it is allowing the club’s members to make their own laws to support their companies, people, workers, layoffs, and incomes.

An egoistic Europe would have created its destruction’s assumptions.

A generous Europe, as it is, created the assumptions for a geo-pole’s future.

It lent money and so it will ask them back.

But depts - because we should talk about debts - will become a strong political bonding for the next decade.

The USA faced pandemic as they had drunk too much. One day they were drunk, the other they were sober.

They will lose 6.1% of their GDP, that is, a great amount. Even in the wealth of their GDP’s trillions, they have showed their weaknesses: health care - which absorbs 18% of GDP but cannot heal and take care of the weakest -, obsolete infrastructure, denial of environment protection, weak education, a nutrition which creates each year one third of obese, pre-diabetics and diabetics people, a terrible social inequality which we are going to analyse in this book.

Facing these real weaknesses, the world’s leading country should wonder whether to start a life-saving programme or to close its borders in the name of isolation, while eating pop corns.

Elections are closer each day.

I will say little about Africa, because there is little to say. It is on the margins of everything, even of Coronavirus. Its contagion’s figures are small, but its governments have aped Europe and blocked countries as they were red zones.

The hope is that warm temperatures and people’s antibodies - accustomed to plagues - will protect everybody’s health, otherwise it will be a humanitarian tragedy.

Even if the virus doesn’t attack them so strongly, also for them the pandemic will be an economic tragedy and will be an accelerator for their poverty.

Just few words about Italy.

After the commemoration of our health heroes - because they are nothing less than heroes - we will share with Europe our economic and industrial’s renovation.

This is a big economic and social problem which can be turned into an opportunity.

Italy is skilled and creative and maybe it is the best in Europe.

The question is whether its people are willing to roll up their sleeves, as for years they have been sitting on a huge patrimony created when people used to do it.

The challenge is triple: digital recovery, bureaucracy’s downsizing, and debit’s reduction.

Among these, the last one cannot be delayed.

With a public debt being worth 160% of GDP - but one fifth of Italian wealth - and with loans we should give back, I think it’s time to do some counts for the safety of the most beautiful country in the world.

Covid-19 will be an innovation, new capitalism and cooperation booster

Crisis pushes forward the big area of innovations, from digital to energy.

The shift to system’s digitalization will be one of the first crisis’ consequences. In these days, apps are checking distances and meetings to fight the virus.

Artificial intelligences will find other ways out.

Energies will soon turn renewable after the present crisis of oil, more for economic than moral reasons.

Those jobs which were changing have been tested and they were successful.

Not only smart working, also remote health care, e-commerce, home delivery and so on.

Change was in the air and the virus climbed the mountain. Now change is slowing down and in the end, capitalism will be questioned in almost all the world.

For years the slogan has been “Less state, more private”, but today the situation turns upside down, giving power to public institutions which have been downgraded for a long time, in order to fight dictatorships using the state to gain hegemony and to feed trade - which now lacks life - with public works and creation or improvement of infrastructure. From Reagan back to Keynes.

Innovations spread in politics, too. The three geo-poles have strengthened, showing their weaknesses but also their values. The Cold War will go on as usual and will be the main feature of next years - without protagonists such as Russia and India which in this situation have taken weak and uncertain steps. Globalization has proved how unstoppable it is and its future is solid: all is connected and keeps connected, despite the Cold War.

Without world trade, the world doesn’t go on.

Finally, despite all difficulties, the virus has created a mood of cooperation and solidarity which along with trade’s globalization can cope with new and more updated politics, keeping souverainism’s and nationalism’s smallness away.

The virus taught us nobody can live alone, and everything resists if we hold each other’s hands.

Diego Masi, Milan,

April 26th, 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYWHICH WORLD?

After the coronavirus…

Today’s world is vastly different from yesterday. Coronavirus showed world’s weakness, confirmed that globalization exists, that geo-poles - China, the USA, Europe - live autonomous lives and that solidarity is often a bad-used word.

The virus showed that national borders are politics’ but not nature’s imagination’s results, as climate change has already demonstrated.

The virus showed Europe’s difficulty in being a supportive pole.

As a consequence, lots of people commented its decline - even if it is having a sudden improvement during these days.

It showed how a viral war will become soon a financial and economic defeat which will emphasize how economy connects everything in the world.

In the end the virus showed that economic and financial operations can be done but also undone easily.

Once there were wars, today there is a virus.

Maybe, as Mr. Draghi said in a serious and forward-looking article, if someone doesn’t provide quick and big money injections and strong measures to support companies and doesn’t change public debt’s situation, this virus will cause a world’s recession.

I’m writing this last part of the book - as the introduction must always be written at the end, along with the foreword - during the lockdown our government imposed us and I’m realizing that the entire book could have been affected by the illness’ virulence.

I make it clearer: we made a meticulous work to collect and project all figures and now while reading and proudly tiding them up, I must confess they have worsened.

I am not going to change them, because numbers can fit also in a world facing a viral recession.

There will be changes in the next five years and they will erase COVID’s damages, so that long-term projections will be valid anyway.

Just have a look at curves and graphics flattening during the terrible financial crisis in 2008 or in 2001 - linked to Twins Towers’ attack: those were great shocks.

They caused consequences for some years, then everything fixed, as data we collected and suggested show.

Moreover, shocks involve new creativities which make things different.

We could witness an improvement in equality, a greater attention for climate, a Europe showing cohesion and not arguments, inventing new solidarity’s systems and becoming more “European”, a greater awareness about producing inside geo-poles which will become autonomous, a greater attention for science and expertise, a quicker way to become digital and a faster and less painful change of work.

There could be lots of examples of the viral shock which closed billions of people inside their houses - at least the ones owning a house…

Our figures don’t want to win the Nobel Prize for economy, because they want only to demonstrate multi-annual trends and to make geo-politics clearer.

Lots of people narrates about it, but nobody talks about it using numbers.

Few people know that Africa’s importance is little, that Russia is less worth than what people think, that China’s middle class is weak - and so it is in America -, that Europe’s situation is the best in the world.

And that is so because nobody has a look at numbers: everybody is talking, but they are not looking at data. Then, we are not changing data.

For, past ones are history and future ones are perspectives. An added decimal number or percentage doesn’t make the difference.

L-, V- or U-curves don’t change the core of our statement, that is world’ development’s trend will be smaller in the next fifty years than it has been in the past fifty. However, we must pay attention to 2020 because its GDP will be smaller than we thought: 3% in the world, 6% in developed countries and 1% in developing countries - and this is what the last IMF’s outlook says.

Anyway, the virus is only the booster confirming in advance that world’s development will be stuck - and data already told this.

With or without the virus, world would have been stuck anyway.

In the past fifty years world’s development was possible because of Asia’ demographic growth and China’s ability to enter globalization after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For fifty years world nominal GDP increased by 27 times and pro-capita GDP by 12 times, while population was getting doubled - from 3.7 to 7.8 billion people.

Chinese people used to earn 110 dollars a year in 1970, while today they earn 9,800 dollars.

In Asia they passed from 205 dollars to 3,200 dollars a year.

After 2000, Asia’s growth - leaded by China + made the world global, improved 3 billion people’s lives and brought American and European middle classes to their knees.

So, why will there be less development?

World population will continue to grow in the next fifty years, from 7.8 billion to 10.5 billion - that is 2.7 billion more - and these are people who will be supposed to work, consume, spend, eat and be rich - those few white people remaining.

Will it be so?

It will not.

This movie will be different.

Only African population will increase and will be 2.1 in 2.7 billion, that is 80% of world population.

But Africa is not like China or Asia and it is not developing.

This chart explains Africa’s development:

Source: IMF, “World Economic Outlook (WEO) Database”, April 2019 Edition; available at: [https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2019/01/weodata/index.aspx], UN DESA, “National Accounts - Analysis of Main Aggregates (AMA)”; available at: [https://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/Basic] and UN DESA, “World Population Prospects”; available at: [https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery/].

Just have a look at daily pro-capita GDP and you will understand: 5 dollars a day, then 7, then 8, 9 and 12, from now till the end of this century.

Do you think a continent made of 54 bad-governed countries, most of them corrupted, all of them oligarchic -at least the little clubs leading countries - can grow and develop having such low incomes?

Africa is cursed by Achilles and the tortoise’s paradox: the more population grows, the less Africa gets rich.

This continent is condemned to poverty, imposing a non-growth to the world, because if all children born from now till the end of the century don’t develop, get rich and spend, world will be stuck.

In the meantime, there is a new cold war

China has changed its strategy and for some years has been creating the Silk Road, that is infrastructure, ports, and roads for their products.

It wants also to find more solid or at least alternative markets.

China was at first a great producer for other countries, then it started to export cheap products and now it is an exporter of high-quality things, such as technological stuff.

Today it has a high pro-capita GDP, but it shows also the first hints of internal inequality - 10% of rich people and 50% of extremely poor ones.

50% of adult and poor people cannot afford to spend money, as they earn 4,000 dollars a year - for instance, a poor American earns 28,000 dollars and a poor European 24,000 dollars.

So, China is obliged to find routes to export, as it has almost finished its internal consumption’s possibilities. The market it hoped to exploit, that is Africa, cannot be anymore.

China used Africa, bought its raw materials and its lands, strengthened Chinese construction companies by multiplying poor infrastructure which is already shabby.

But Africa cannot be a business, because it is too far and too poor. Asia and our beautiful Europe are better.

So, China launched the new Silk Road to create Eurasia, making deals and having arguments with the allies found on the road to invasion, from Russia, to India, to Stans.

China must arrive in Europe, which is wealthy, anaemic, and old.

All the others - except for some ambiguous European leaders - realized it and started the Cold War, which is now blatant against the USA, but which is going to involve all the world.

Globalization era will end, and the era of re-allocation will start when each geo-pole will try and do all things at home.

And what are the USA doing?

During 2016 elections Trump never talked about the “China problem”.

His “America first” programme won because of an angry middle class who since the nineties had not improved its situation anymore.

It won because of the end of the America dream and not of economic globalization’s disruption.

He knew little about China and only that companies were producing there and not in America.

In order to take work back to America, he started -unaware of it, I think - his tariffs’ war which slowly became the new Cold War.

His idea was that of isolation and of abandoning previous presidents’ multilateralism.

It was up to all other nations and Europe to understand whether starting to do for themselves would be better. This vision betrays USA’s mission in the world, but maybe during next years it will turn into a lucky decision, especially for a part of Asia and certainly for Europe.

50 go and 50 come

The years we are leaving behind will be remembered as happy years.

Population, wealth, wellness, all developed.

Middle classes played the lion’s role in the USA and Europe, and in Asia, too.

Data are clear: world GDP increased by 27 times and pro-capita GDP by 12 times.

No world wars, some local wars, and some terrorism, but no dramatic events, except for Twin Towers’ attack and Coronavirus.

Inventions, new treatments, longer life, the internet, mobile phones, social networks and many many other things.

Baby boomers created a fertile era and left some bad legacies which will affect next decades: economic inequality and climate change.

The first one brought the middle class to its knees in the USA and in Europe and created an unreachable wealth for 1% of the world and poverty in rich countries, like it was at the beginning of the 20th century.

The second one is the result of industrialization which used our planet as a huge dumpsite for toxic waste. They polluted the air and now are forcing us to use clean energies, with a great programme which can also be economically profitable.

The upcoming years are easy to understand if we consider development’s arithmetic, but difficult to analyse if we take into consideration some slow transformations the world is living.

There will be slow development, population will grow by 3 billion - 25% more than now - and GDP will increase threefold, while pro-capita only by 2.4 times.

The starting numbers of this development are bigger than past ones, but we already said that Africa doesn’t take part into the world’s ball, even if it is worth 80% of demographic growth. Next fifty years seem to be stuck. However, there is a big “but” - and it cannot be misunderstood: transformations, revolutionary or exploding, can affect or change future development, positively or negatively.

The eight transformations which can change our future

Excessive inequality, wild urbanization, technological innovations, work transformations, climate change, medium class’ defeat, more people getting older and change in the political leadership.

It is clear that these transformations are not such silly things. Each one of them has its own history and affects the others.

Everybody can understand that they meet, link, affect and change each other.

Without one of them, another one is impossible.

With no medicine, human beings don’t get older.

With no technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology, there would not be any medical development, that is so innovative right now.

In this big bunch of news, innovations, and experimentations our children will live their best years.

Europe, or the waking sleeping beauty

In this three-poled world, after thousands of years spent in internal fights, during happy years Europe started to become a world reality, that is a geo-pole.

With the USA and China, these three poles produce almost 60% of world GDP.

However, for these last fifty years Europe has changed and has given itself institutions and a currency.

Doing that, it looked at its navel and built its body around it, while it should have showed a frightening face to the others. But now time is over, and the fight cannot be postponed anymore.

Looking at data, Europe is rich. Its average incomes are high, and they have remained so - while American ones haven’t. Its medium class is beaten but not destroyed. People’s average age is keeping on getting older and the continent has lost almost 80 million people in the last eighty years.

If we took a picture of Europe, its photo album would contain lots of beautiful pictures to watch in future years: people getting older, a medium class’ condition being better than elsewhere, its wealth being worth 25% of the world, a strong welfare - that is healthcare and pensions balancing the growth of old people -, enviable culture and education, an industrial politics being strong in the manufacturing sector but weak in modern technology, and a sensitiveness for environmental politics being stronger than other geo-poles’ ones.

Finally, always democratic governments and a stable and strong currency.

However, the album would have also ruined and faded pictures and some of them would be the rear faces of the beautiful ones: the backwardness in technological evolution, people getting older and making the continent anaemic and powerless, the weakness in facing immigration with strength and unity, because of mediocre electoral reasons. Last but not least, the absence of an elected and legitimated governance. We don’t care about how, but a reform is necessary to boost and give power to our continent, giving it the role it deserves in the world.

We cannot deny it, but continuous uncertainties and obstacles of old nationalisms are weakening its internal power and its external image.

Our sleeping beauty is in the middle of the ford.

She can step forward and cannot go back, but she risks sinking and drowning. The ford is simple to cross, but it gets wider under her feet.

She has just to be enough brave to cross it as she has done a thousand times during last centuries.

Africa. An exploding continent

On the other side of the ford, there is Africa.

Here are some explosive evident elements which sum up what you are going to find in this book.

The first evident element is the unstoppable demographic growth. From 1.5 billion of today, to 2.5 billion of 2050, to 4.5 billion by the end of this century.

An unbelievable demographic rush which has never been seen during human history. The second one is poverty.

The third one is the economic non-growth which blocks incomes and development. The fourth one is great and useless urbanization which will transform cities in hells and explosive powder kegs. The fifth evident element is lack of work. The sixth one is inadequate services.

The seventh one but the most important and the first in terms of priorities is the inability of the political class which is dictatorial or falsely democratic, predatorial and often corrupted, whom young Africans give their poor future to, when they don’t revolt.

The last one is a wonder: Africa is extraordinarily rich in lots of things, such as raw materials, arable and available lands - 75% of African lands - and endless energy.

It is rich in creativity, imagination, and every single nature’s gift, which is taken and used by very few people.

Eurafrica. A brave solution to win the game

Pieces are on the table, like it happens during a Risk’s match. Europe is rich, anaemic, old and with no demographic future, so much that it will lose 80 million people by the end of the century and its inhabitants will be the oldest in the world - more than one third of them will be more than 65 years old.

Africa is poor, extremely poor, half of its population is less than 20 years old, there is no work, but it is rich in young people searching for their future. It is rich in raw materials, lands, and energy, but also in an untrustworthy political class.

The Cold War is a reality and its prey is Europe.

China is building a long road to reach and divide us. After many years of great multilateralism, the USA have closed their doors and are trying to act like China, creating and making divisions in Europe easier.

In this Cold War, big international organizations are cracking.

First NATO, then WTO, and then it will be up to United Nations, WHO, world banks and so on.

The other strong countries, such as India, Russia, Middle East, Japan, Brazil, spin around, enter, strengthen, and weaken the three geo-poles’ political and war game. This game’s prize is hegemony in the world.

Europe, which is the easier prey, should have a strategy to flee away from the other two players’ mortal hug.

In this mortal match, the only move and possible strategy, which is brave and creative, is Africa.

It represents what Europe has not: young people, workers, richness.

The other side of Europe and it is necessary to let them match.

In this game, it is important to decide how to do it. Europe should not create a Marshall Plan for Africa nor send its armies to conquer countries.

It should create a series of micro-plans being part of a long-term programme.

If Europe made plans and declared them to the others, it would lose the game.

The first goal is to slowly create anAfrican internal marketto make it become a real world-market having Europe’s prior involvement.

We should take there our companies and support them at least at the beginning - working in Africa is hard and unprofitable at the beginning -, create benchmarks and best practice and eliminate random helps.

This would create internal wealth, work, and GDP’s growth for them and for us.

If a market develops, even in a slow way, it will become an added richness. Our new revenue, their luck.

As our former minister, Mr. Siniscalco, said, we should support a permanent training for young Africans by creating a European agency for work,supporting professionality, and improving their education.

In facts, we have a culture and an education which are some millenniums old, we have tons of universities and scholars and we can export them and earn something from it.

We should choose the right countries where to start to work.Africa is made of 54 countries, but 14 of them are worth more than 80% of African GDP. The choice is then simple and not impossible, we have just to create a concentration curve - which you can find in this book.

We should support and manage immigration by creating a European ministry for Africa.

We cannot keep on thinking that we don’t need immigration. We must state it with determination and courage, we must shout loud that immigrants are precious for an old continent. It is necessary to act and fight this war that is so important for a continent lacking population. Last, we should help in every possible way to create the conditions for anon-corrupted new African democracy.This is and will be the hardest goal to reach, but it is almost fundamental for the others.

Time is little and we cannot waste it.

With the unreliable African governments, we cannot make long plans, important deals or do forward-looking businesses.

These points are not a plan - I would not dare - but they wish to be a kind of suggestion for a possible programme. In facts, thinking about our Risk game if you put together Europe and Africa, you win. And poor Africa wins, too. You are going to read about this and more in next chapters and you will do it together with a 20-year-old boy named Tommaso. He has a century in front of him and I decided to make this journey with him.

I will speak a language which is extremely far from politicians’ formal language, because I want this journey to be pleasant for him.

I hope it will be so for you, too.

Have a nice reading.

Diego Masi

“For Tommaso. Born in a century of complete change.”

This book is a journey from past to future and I decided to make it with a boy, trying to explain to him what he must expect.

Talking with a young person I will abandon politicians’ formal language and I will explain data and show him all I think he doesn’t know.

Tommaso was born in 2000, twenty years ago.

Today he is a brilliant student in sociology.

When people ask him why he chose this course, he answers he wants to know the society he lives in.

His family is modern: he is an only child, his parents are divorced and married again, and he has lots of relatives he doesn’t know.

An undefined religion with no belief nor principles, like his political ideas.

He voted, but he regretted it.

It feels European because he has travelled inside Europe many times because of low-cost flights and a quite good knowledge of English.

At school he has never been one the best students, nor one of the worst.

His family is wealthy, and Tommaso is not worried even if he doesn’t know what he will do in the future yet. Tommaso is a symbol of our society: he starts his productive life with no ideas about what, how and where he will do in the future.

He doesn’t need to work like other peers of his, but he has got an impressive curiosity which will help him to find out what this century will look like before he decides what to do.

He knows that world is changing, but he cannot see the threads connecting it nor a possible solution’s texture, nor something to fight for, nor a job which excites him. He communicates with the world using social networks, but he is not pushed to commit himself to something.

He is walking on the road which often takes people far from the place they want to reach, where everybody is giving advice, but he doesn’t want to listen to them, because he wants to do for himself.

In facts, at his age we only want to conquer the world.

But which kind of world will it be?

.1

THE BEGINNING OF A CHANGING WORLD.FROM NATION STATES TO GEO-POLES

According to International Monetary Fund, in 2020 there will be three geo-political blocks facing each other: the USA, the European Union and China.

The three blocks are remarkably similar in terms of GDP. The USA owns 24% of it, the EU owns 18% - with Great Britain out - and China owns 17%. They differ in terms of population - there are millions of people in Europe and billions in China - and of nominal pro-capita GDP - from 67,000 dollars per year in the USA to 38,000 dollars per year in Europe to 10,500 dollars in China. I add Africa: an African person earns 1,900 dollars per year, that is one tenth of China and one thirtieth of the USA.

Source: IMF, “World Economic Outlook (WEO) Database”, April 2019 Edition; available at: [https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2019/01/weodata/index.aspx], UN DESA, “National Accounts - Analysis of Main Aggregates (AMA)”; available at: [https://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/Basic] and UN DESA, “World Population Prospects”; available at: [https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery/].

These are Tommaso’s starting blocks in his conquest of the world.

These are world’s big blocks, the geo-poles, which are going to start a big fight, involving millions of other protagonists on the background which will create and destroy alliances.

However, it has not always been like that. Last fifty years have been hard, but in the end, they have been good and peaceful if seen from here. There haven’t been great wars, there have been lots of inventions, the internet and technological disruption saw the light and we have created new treatments which made our life expectation 10-years longer. After the post-war recovery, a Cold War started between two visions of our world, the Western one, based on market, private entrepreneurship, human rights’ development, and the search for happiness, and the communist one, wanting a 100% equality.

However, despite their fight, last fifty years have seen this unbelievable growth of world GDP. From 1970 till now, population has doubled, reaching 7.9 billion people, and pro-capita GDP has increased by 12 times.

Source: UN Population Trend.

That is, an unstoppable rush making all western world’s baby boomers happy.

While running in the meadows of wealth, they didn’t realize that the chasm was only some steps away from them. In the Cold War between market and communism, free market defeated the second till 1989 and all things found their balances on communism’s ashes.

Then, a new rush caused by China’s need to feed one billion people - a growth which a foreseeing Mao blocked with the only-child law - started, helped by a wave of neo-liberalism launched by Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher.

In this way products’ and market’s globalization’s rush started, pushed forward by two boosters with no ideological colours - or at least, it seems so.

Our baby boomers entered the new bubble with no presence of mind but with a lot of greed.

They introduced goods which were produced at extremely low costs and brought noticeably big incomes for greedy western people - at least for the wealthy 1%.

GDP increased a lot in Asia - in China, from 1970’s 100 dollars per year to today’s 10,700 dollars - and a lot less in western countries, hitting fixed-income classes and people having obsolete jobs.

Moreover, other western phenomena, such as technological revolution, new environmental approaches and people living longer lives, played their role.

Middle class has not improved its standards of life which are stuck at 1990’s incomes.

Today’s children will not have what their grandparents had, and the result was that middle-class people got very angry and started to revolt against governors, as they didn’t know what was happening and why. Globalization turned political.

Leading classes’ blindness was greater than their greed and now everyone - Davos’ elite, too - can see what happened.

The 1% revolt, the so-called populist parties - from Podemos to Cinque Stelle -, Yellow Vests Movements, traditional parties’ defeat, big coalitions in all European countries and then the flashiest phenomena, such as Trump’s election - and maybe re-election - and Brexit breaking Europe.

That is, a political disaster slowing globalization down, opening our eyes on China’s ideological willing and showing western countries’ decline.

Looking at all changes from 1970 till today, if you pay attention you can see western powers’ - or better, European nations’, which were protagonists until the nineties - decline.

You can see the climax of the USA’s hegemony and the beginning of their transformation, the end of communism’s cycle from 1917 till 1989 with the fall of Berlin Wall, and the birth of the internet.

You can observe technology evolution which will affect the 21st century and the brutal change in work.

You can see the powerful start of globalization, which allowed the creation of a third pole inside world competition, Asia, towed by China, which for better or worse will become the basis of world rebalancing during next eighty years.

You can see competition among nation states being replaced by that among continents or geo-poles, as I call them.

The upcoming world. Eurasia’s attempt, a weak growth and a certain and striking African demography

The years we are going to live have some characteristics which are unknown to us: an unbalanced increase in demography, a world’s weak and little growth, an atypical pro-capita with a strong inequality, a technological evolution changing jobs, standards of life and habits.

These changes will develop in an extraordinary new political scenario, which we can call the new Cold War, and which has different characters.

We must add then a continent ignored by every radar, that is Africa.

It will become the most populated continent in the world and will make politics’ consequences unpredictable.

As we have already said, in the world there are three geo-poles ruling: the USA, still the hegemonic one, the European Union, divided and quarrelsome, and China, led by the only man, Xi Jinping.

During last years, especially after Trump, globalization has stopped or at least paused, because of lots of reasons, the main of which is western middle class’ rebellion.

World is growing, 1% of people is plenty rich, but middle class hasn’t taken a step forward for decades.

Listening to the painful shout of western countries getting poorer, politics has shifted gears.

The USA elected Trump, which promised a greater isolation and a hard fight against China and Europe in a non-ritualistic way, vastly different from the strong but kind and outward-oriented politics of last presidents, from Clinton onwards.

Then, Brexit came, and all anti-global and populist parties were born, in a so big chaos that the establishment finally got worried.

The start to the new Cold War was finally confirmed by Xi Jinping opening an innovative Silk Road and providing - they say - 1,000 billion dollars.

This way or Road & Belt would aim to keep on supporting export phenomena which have characterized China’s rise until now.

China is dealing with its GDP’s improvement to aim at its supremacy in the world, while it is fearing that its growing internal consumptions cannot do more than what they have done till now.

Therefore, foreign markets’ conquest turns compulsory and a part of this century’s political and economic scenario will develop following this road.

Anyway, the aim seems not to be only commercial as Xi is keeping on saying, but also political.

The aim seems that of slowly absorbing other pieces of Asia which belonged to old Russia, new countries such as Pakistan, maybe India and some pieces of Europe.

The invasion of Africa - which is considered Chinese by lots of people - will be weaker and in facts it has been almost stuck from a couple of years.

Today Europe is observing.

On the one hand, because of its weakness and its willing to take care of its internal divisions, on the other hand to organise a political and social fabric which has been attacked for one thousand years and which keeps lots of suspicions in its DNA.

Therefore, the European pole seems to be the weakest one and the most likely to be attacked, especially after Great Britain went its own way.

Europe is risking being yanked by everyone.

By the USA which want to break it to make weak countries their friends and by China which wants to ubtly buy some pieces of countries to rule in.

In this moment, European union resists.

Commission has been inaugurated, the environmental politics is right and most population is pro-Europe - less than before but the majority of it.

In the meantime, demography grows but only in Africa

Demography will grow a lot, but it is abnormal.

Today we are 7.8 billion people and in 2075 we will be 10.5 billion.

However, in 2.7 billion new-born people, almost everyone - 2.1 billion - will be African, while the rest of them will be Asians - especially Indians - and Americans.

In 2050 Africa will double its births and in 2100 it will double the double, to reach 4.3 billion people.

Source: IMF, “World Economic Outlook (WEO) Database”, April 2019 Edition; available at: [https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2019/01/weodata/index.aspx], UN DESA, “National Accounts - Analysis of Main Aggregates (AMA)”; available at: [https://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/Basic] and UN DESA, “World Population Prospects”; available at: [https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery/].

At the end of this century, in 10 people we will have 4 Asians, 4 black people, 1 white person and 1 South American.

This African rush will be raging in quantity but not in the economy.

Today Africa is worth less than 3% of world GDP - that is extraordinarily little - and at the end of the century it will be worth only 4%, with more than 4 billion people to feed.

In other words Africa will be very poor and its poverty risks causing conditions for world instability and especially for Europe, which in the meantime will see its population decreasing by 20% - with one third of its inhabitants being more than 65 years old.

Europe is rich but old and anaemic, and a young, poor, and maybe also angry giant is lying at its feet.

Demographic growth was the development’s key, but from today on it will not grow anymore

World is stopping, as it has run out of its energy. According to data, GDP will increase by 2.5 times from now till 2075 - compared to the 12-time growth of the past fifty years.

It is true that the starting point of the growth is good, but there is no continent at the moment which can develop like it has done in the past fifty years. Let’s start from numbers: in the past fifty years, the world has seen Asian giant’s growth, which started a turbo rush because of China and has had its GDP increased from poverty to 10,000 dollars per person - especially after 2000 when China was admitted to WTO. From that time on, in the last years, world GDP has doubled.

Now Asia is growing a lot but not as much as in the past. It is starting to go back to normal levels.

India is a mystery, while China cannot be Asian growth’s booster anymore because of its decreasing demography. And then?

What remains?