439 Ángel Rodríguez García-Brazales, Jorge Turmo Arnal y Óscar Vara Crespo The effect of global economic imbalances on the military strategy of the United States and China. Up to now, China has produced low value-added goods, which sell at very low prices. The country has to try to ensure that part of its industrial structure is engaged in the production of value-added goods, or at least intermediate goods, so that wages can be paid accordingly. This change is attainable for Chinese businesses, as eviden-ced by the increasing number of companies that produce high value-added products (Lenovo and Huawei are good examples), as well as the growing importance that China is attaching to secondary and higher education to improve workers’ skills. In the aerospace sector - a field that is closely related to the military industry – China is demonstrating that it is capable of developing technology as well as any other country, with its space programme being its flagship project. 4.2 The effects on China’s armed forces. China’s public sector plays a very important role in the economy, although sometimes a relatively inefficient one, and there is therefore room for improvement. This could be achieved by focusing efforts on two main aspects: infrastructure and dual-use technology. Infrastructure in China is still poor and an area where there is obvious room for improvement. Increased public spending in this area would boost aggregate productivity and enable non-specialised, low-wage jobs to be combined with skilled ones with higher salaries. However, the most important sector here is the second one (dual-use technology). As we highlighted earlier on, the Chinese army is generally technologically underdeveloped and more emphasis tends to placed on the number of soldiers and units than on weaponry and support systems. At the same time, technology universities in China are on the increase and attracting a large part of the country’s best trained youth. The circumstances are therefore right for the Chinese military budget, which has increased considerably without a corresponding increase in its contribution to GDP, to be redirected towards military projects in areas that require intensive use of cutting-edge technology: communications systems, conventional and non-conventional weapons, logistics and organisation, and training systems and programmes. In all these areas, China has plenty of room for improvement that can be leveraged. This would entail the Chinese army recruiting a large number of engineers and middle-level technicians or, alternatively, hiring private or semi-private companies with the staff to undertake all these processes. Bearing in mind the type and quality of products we are talking about, the wages and other remuneration of workers would be significantly higher and this would affect large portions of the population. In addition, the technological know-how obtained through military research would be transferred – as has always been the case - to civil activity, thus giving rise to an overall increase in the technology component of goods and services in general. And the greater the technology component, the higher the value added to goods and services and the higher the salaries. Furthermore, the companies engaged in these types of projects would be capable of placing value-added goods and services on the market for civil use,
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