The 80^th CIDEG academic salon was held on March 8^th at SPPM, Tsinghua University. Professor Carl Dahlman from Georgetown University delivered a talk entitled as “The World under Pressure: How China and India Are Influencing the Global Economy and Environment”. Dr. Shufang Chi, postdoctoral research fellow of CIDEG, moderated this salon. More than twenty graduate students and faculties from several schools of Tsinghua University joined the event.

In his talk, Prof. Dahlman briefly introduced the history, current situation and future trends of the development of China and India. Then, he compared the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of both countries. He concluded that the rapid rise of China and India would exert both positive and negative influences upon the world. For example, they are creating global frictions in trade, resources, CO₂ emissions as well as geopolitics, which might be not easily solved among current global governance systems. Thus, the major powers in the world, including the US, China, and India, should take further responsibilities to address these frictions, and to create an environmentally sustainable and integrated global economic system. Although the practice could be extremely complicated for political and economical reasons, it is still worth it for us to take these huge challenges so to avoid the unbearable human costs in the future.

After Prof. Dahlman’s talk, the audience also discussed several hot button issues such as the shortage of resource, the strategy to rebalance global trade, population policy, human resources and higher education.