Boom time in global entrepreneur-land

While we in the West continue to be anxious about the pace of the economic recovery, from China and India all the way to Sub-Saharan Africa, the excitement of a new generation - no longer held back by the economic, technological and personal limitations of their parents' generation - is palpable.

Masked beneath all the talk about the global financial crisis, an even bigger phenomenon is at work, one that in due course will overpower the memory of the current crisis. That phenomenon is the unleashing of the global entrepreneurial capabilities of the bottom half - or rather, two-thirds - of humanity.

As a result, a great rebalancing is under way. While Westerners are in for more uncertainty, people in the developing world who have had to live with significant uncertainty for many decades, if not centuries, now find themselves moving in the opposite direction.