The next growth point of the global economy will come from the democratization, legalization, and marketization of certain countries.

Over the past seventy years, besides technological advancements, the world’s economic growth has relied on two strategies:
The first is the post-war population explosion in Europe and America, with people buying houses and cars, driving demand-driven growth;
The second is China’s integration into the global division of labor, with hundreds of millions of cheap laborers flooding into the market, effectively giving the world economy a major blood transfusion.
Now, both strategies have been exhausted.
Global population growth has stalled, and urbanization has reached its limit. More troubling is that debt levels in various countries have hit the ceiling, and the old approach of relying on borrowing for infrastructure development is no longer viable.
So, what’s the next step?
The answer is simple: open the door to those resources that are still kept out.
Countries like North Korea, Iran, and Russia have a combined population of several hundred million, with many young people and abundant resources. But they are trapped by their own systems and cannot participate in global trade. It’s like a factory leaving half of its machines idle while complaining about insufficient capacity.
China has already proven that this path is feasible. After joining the WTO in 2001, over a billion people integrated into the global market, transforming the entire world.
Of course, China’s reform was not thorough enough — it was willing to be a factory but reluctant to be a market, which disappointed the U.S.. The U.S. initially believed that doing business would gradually make these countries more open-minded. But it turned out that wasn’t the case; economic growth did not automatically lead to political reform. Since soft approaches failed, harder measures will follow. This is not a choice but a structural contradiction forced out by circumstances.
Look at recent examples: Bangladesh has changed, and Venezuela and Iran are also at critical points. These countries will open up sooner or later because they cannot survive without opening. The process will be chaotic, with regime changes, economic turbulence, and social fractures inevitable.
But the direction is clear — integrating idle populations and resources into the global market is the only way to break through growth bottlenecks.
Technological revolutions are important; but the potential unleashed by institutional reforms will be no less than another "China Rise."
In the next twenty years, one of the biggest drivers of global economic growth will come from the forced opening of these countries. This process is far from over.