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China's economy will overtake that of the United States by 2035 and be twice its size by midcentury, a study released Tuesday by a U.S. research organisation concluded. The report by economist Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said China's rapid growth is driven by domestic demand more than exports, which will be sustainable over the coming decades.
"China's economic performance clearly is no flash in the pan," Keidel writes. "Its growth this decade has averaged more than 10% a year and is still going strong in the first half of 2008. Because its success in recent decades has not been export-led but driven by domestic demand, its rapid growth can continue well into the 21st century, unfettered by world market limitation."
Keidel, who has worked as a World Bank economist and U.S. Treasury official, said that China's rise to become the world's biggest economy will happen regardless of the method of calculation. Under current market-based estimates, China's gross domestic product is about 3 trillion USD compared to 14 trillion for the United States. Based on a more controversial purchasing power parity (PPP) measure used by the World Bank and others to correct low labour-cost distortions, he said China's GDP is roughly half that of the United States.
"Despite this low starting point, if China's expansion is anywhere near as fast as the earlier expansion of other East Asian modernizers at a comparable stage of development, the power of compound growth rates means that China's economy will be larger than America's by midcentury - no matter how it is converted to U.S. dollars," Keidel wrote. "Indeed, PPP valuation distinctions will diminish and eventually disappear."
Keidel's calculations suggest that using the PPP method, China will catch up with the United States as an economic power by 2020, with an equivalent GDP of 18 trillion USD. Based on the more commonly accepted market method, the turning point will come by 2035. By 2050, he estimated Chinese GDP at some 82 trillion USD compared with 44 trillion for the United States.
Full story in English
News category: China
Published on this site: Jul. 16, 2008
Source:news.smh.com.au
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