By Richard (Rick) Mills

As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information

"How soon will the Chinese natural resource demand decrease? The Chinese population is significantly larger than every individual country's population in the world (except India)." Is China the New North? Assessing the Impact of Chinese Trade with Latin America, Brookings Institution

"In terms of long-term structural trends, demand is now driven by an urbanization process that is far more structural than consensus generally believes. On our analysis, China is only 20 to 25 per cent along the path towards being a mature materials market and it may take at least six to nine years before demand intensity peaks." Andrew Keen, Thorsten Zimmermann and Lourina Pretorius, analysts at HSBC

BCG Consulting says China is expected to become the world's second largest consumer market by 2015 and by 2020 China's consumer consumption nation-wide will amount to 22 percent of total global consumption, behind only the U.S. at 35 percent. The expected transition from an investment led economy to a more consumer focused model will bring about continued growth.

The McKinsey Global Institute projects that India's middle class will grow to 583 million people in the next two decades. At the same time, the country will advance from the world's 12th largest consumer market to the fifth largest.

Africans, on a per capita basis, are richer than Indians and a full dozen African states have higher gross national income per capita than China.

Today Africa has 14% of the world's population and by 2050 one in every four people on the planet will be African - by 2027 Africa will have more people than does China or India.

The New Silk Road

Over the last few years the economic cycles of developed economies have become disconnected from the cycles of the developing world. A crisis in the US or Europe does not hurt development in Africa, India or China as much as many believe. That's because there's been a shift in global trade taking place with developing countries increasingly interacting with each other instead of their old trading partners, the developed nations.

"A network of new "South-South" trading routes connecting Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America are set to revolutionize the global economy. Trade and capital flows between emerging areas of the world could increase tenfold in the next forty years. In the same way that trade between the developed nations exploded in the 1950s and 1960s, we expect the 21st Century to see turbocharged trade growth between the emerging nations."