Global economic crises, environmental-resource scarcity and wealth concentration

Three new structural factors underlie the most recent global crisis: (i) the fact that several high-population countries have joined the growth process; (ii) the increasing scarcity of environmental and certain natural resources; and (iii) the extraordinary concentration of income and wealth that has occurred in the advanced economies over the last two decades. These structural changes have significantly strengthened the links between global growth and commodity demand; they have made world commodity supply increasingly inelastic, and have rendered economic growth more dependent on easy monetary and financial policies. The combination of these factors could make the world economy highly crisis-prone and may hinder recovery from the current one.