If someone in Canada is truly several times more productive than anyone in the U.S., some U.S. company will offer them several times more money than any Canadian company will. This is the down-side of having our economy linked so closely with that of the U.S.. They poach our best talent aggressively. If politics lets us turn the tables for a few years, that's great, but it's not going to make us a superpower.
You're assuming than a developed country can have 10x the output of another developed country, per capita. If that happens, then the second country isn't actually developed :)
The new super powers are way more likely to be China and India, as their huge populations go through the generational shift of people moving out of the lower class into the middle class.
>>The new super powers are way more likely to be China and India, as their huge populations move into the middle class.
Huge populations means nothing in the context of India. Unfortunately our politicians have repeated this tripe enough number of times to make it look like its some kind of inevitable economic dividend which we will reap.
The only known purpose masses of population have in a knowledge driven era like we live in is to compete with machine automation as meat robots, until the machine automation gets cheaper.
Beyond this having a huge population without good education, training and lack of a general progressive culture is a net negative. To sustain these people you get a huge defense bill and a range of social security spending thatlargely taxes productive people in a disproportionate way.
You also have to deal with a huge population scale with weird political and religious beliefs. Its a net negative.
At a rate of growth of 7%, from which India was not far off in the last 10 years, your economy doubles in 10 years. Let's say that it's a bit slower and it takes 12 years. This still means that India will double its economy by 2030. And unless they mess it up really badly their growth should keep going. Following more or less the Chinese model of using their huge scale to draw foreign investment.
Growth in India is a result of plucking the low hanging fruit in the immediate aftermath of going from largely a socialist centrally planned economy to a sort of free market economy.
This process has been gradually unfolding over the past two decades, as we invite foreign direct investments and do away with many pointless regulations.
This sort of a growth has a upper limit which will be breached sooner or later.
b) around the point where Mexico or Brazil are (Mexico: $10k GDP per capita, Brazil: $8k, India: $2k)
India just by reaching Brazil's level can still grow its economy 4 times or more. At that point its economy would be something like 80% of the US one, based on sheer population volume.
And this is only one scenario, one where they fall into this "middle income trap".
India has four times the population of the US. Yet the economic output is no where comparable.
More important than masses is quality trained population. Human ingenuity and talent can't be matched through scale.