Six Routes To A Richer World

The final stop on our six country tour is America, where we ask whether the famous land of opportunity still lives up to its promise. As the American dream has been exported throughout the world, does it still apply to people building their businesses here? Marketplace's Lizzie O'Leary heads to Silicon Valley to find out if the boom can lift local aspirations when the new gilded age is so globalised. Krissy Clark then visits Ohio, where the promise of a previous century has evaporated. And in New York we look at how America stacks up against the world's emerging economies and ask how long it can continue to be number one. Will the country remain the focus for the aspirations of the new global middle class? We hear from entreprenuers who have come to New York from around the world, hoping that that America is still the best place to make a modern fortune.

Linda Yueh travels to Shanghai to find out how the economic slowdown and the government’s anti-corruption drive is changing how people do business in China. As part of the A Richer World season we go around the world in 40 days, visiting six key countries and meeting the people who have made it, and those aspiring to make it, to find out how to get ahead - and stay ahead - in the new global economy.

We visit India, a country of one and a quarter billion people, predicted to overtake China, the world's second largest economy, and the only other country with over a billion people. But China and India have two fundamentally different economies. China's meteoric rise was driven by growth in the country’s manufacturing sector, which employs huge numbers of people. The per capita GDP in China is $6,800. In India, those factory jobs never came. The per capita GDP is $1,500 and 300,000,000 million Indians live below the poverty line. So even though India’s growth could outpace China’s, the question is, can this growth lift its population out of poverty? We begin the first leg of our journey in a parking lot in Delhi with a group of the city’s bikers - and we go on to share after work beers with some of India’s smartest technology minds, as well as the country’s most insecure workers. All in pursuit of a richer world.

Six Routes travels to Brazil, where Marketplace’s Lizzie O’Leary encounters the world’s seventh largest economy teetering on the edge of recession. Home of the 2016 Summer Olympics, this mighty BRIC economy - which five years ago boasted a growth rate of more than seven percent - has cooled, possibly at the expense of the country's growing middle class. Along the way Lizzie meets Joao Cavalcanti, who made his money in iron ore and takes a ride in his bullet-proof car. Later, she meets a company who took their money out of commodities and put it into the Brazilian beauty product industry. Plus we hear the first hand account of a family who experienced Brazil’s famous social mobility - 50 million people have joined the middle class between 2003 and 2014 - over three generations.

Six Routes travels to Nigeria, where the BBC’s Nkem Ifejika finds a new generation of entrepreneurs trying to grow businesses that are more than mere ‘side hussles’ for this oil-dependent economy. He meets Mo Abudu, the TV host building a pan-African media brand, the young ‘re-pats’ who have returned to Nigeria to transform healthcare, and the motor manufacturer proving Made in Nigeria isn’t over yet.

Six Routes travels to Germany, where the BBC’s Simon Jack explores how the euro crisis has exposed the country’s unusual relationship with debt. Marketplace's Krissy Clark meets entrepreneurs Jan and Feride of Uslu airlines -- a company that has taken inspiration from Germany's world renowned car industry and used it to make a mark in the make-up industry.