Word: gdp
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...peaceful development." "It's significant that China didn't really criticize it," says Hisahiko Okazaki, a foreign-policy adviser to Abe. It probably doesn't hurt that Japan's defense budget, squeezed by government social programs and massive public debt, is still likely to hover around 1% of GDP, or about $41 billion this year. China's, meanwhile, is increasing at a double-digit rate and will officially hit $36 billion this year-though many analysts believe Beijing's spending is far higher...
...ever feel mesmerized by the usual stuff you hear about China--20% of the world's population, gazillions of brainy engineers, serried ranks of soldiers, 10% economic growth from now until the crack of doom--remember this: China is still a poor country (GDP per head in 2005 was $1,700, compared with $42,000 in the U.S.) whose leaders face so many problems that it is reasonable to wonder how they ever sleep. The country's urban labor market recently exceeded by 20% the number of new jobs created. Its pension system is nonexistent. China is an environmental dystopia...
...factors: the modernization of China's defense forces and the risk of war over Taiwan. The authoritative Military Balance, published annually by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, estimates that China's military spending has increased nearly 300% in the past decade and from 1.08% of its GDP in 1995 to 1.55% in 2005. (By contrast, the U.S. spends 3.9% of its GDP on defense, and the U.S. economy is more than five times as big as China's.) China's most recent defense white paper, published last month, showed a 15% rise in military spending...
...million "high field" MRI machines that can watch the brain at work. The inflationary dynamic spawned by this expansion of health-care capacity exposes flaws in the payment system that sustains U.S. health care. Those flaws partly explain why Americans spend $2 trillion, or 16% of their GDP, for medical care, an outlay that's increasing roughly 7% annually...
...five years ago by Western coalition forces, the government of President Hamid Karzai, beset by warlords and Islamic militants, has struggled to maintain order and control. The country's primitive economy is dominated by illicit opium production, which by some estimates accounts for as much as one-third of GDP. About 40% of Afghans are unemployed. And last month, the World Food Program warned that millions of rural Afghans might starve this winter because a prolonged drought has devastated the wheat harvest...