2023-09-09 07:15:53
According to Bloomberg economists, China is not expected to overtake the United States as the world’s leading economic power, contrary to previous forecasts.
Have the United States already lost the match once morest their great rival? China, which hoped to become the world’s leading economic power by 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic founded by Mao Zedong, will likely miss its objective.
While initial forecasts predicted a handover between the Americans and the Chinese from the start of the 2030s, “China is no longer close to eclipsing the United States as the world’s leading economy, and it will not succeed perhaps never to establish itself in a lasting manner in first place (…)”, indicate the economists of Bloomberg.
“China is moving towards slower growth sooner than expected,” they observe. The country can say goodbye to the period of growth close to 10%: at 3% last year, it has already recorded one of its lowest growth rates in several decades at 3%. In the coming years, growth in Chinese activity should remain modest: +3.5% in 2030, then +0.9% in 2050. That is, levels significantly lower than the projections provided so far (4.3% respectively). and 1.6%).
China’s economy slows
However, in the 1990s, China began to catch up with the United States. At the time, its nominal GDP was only $361 billion, compared to nearly $6,000 billion on the American side. Thirty years later, following years of considerable growth, China produced more than $14,000 billion in wealth in 2019, fast approaching its rival whose GDP was $21,000 billion.
But since the Covid-19 pandemic, the gap has tended to widen once more. In China, the post-Covid economic rebound quickly ran out of steam once morest a backdrop of a serious real estate crisis, a decline in exports and household consumption. Added to this, geopolitical tensions and a deeper structural problem of demographics as the country saw its population decline for the first time last year since the 1960s.
Conversely, the United States is doing better than economists predicted a few months ago. The American job market remains very solid and household consumption robust, while inflation remains relatively moderate across the Atlantic.
China, already the leading economic power in purchasing power parity
Bloomberg estimates that the Chinese economy might still narrowly surpass the American economy in the mid-2040s, but this would only be temporary. China can nevertheless console itself since it became the world’s largest economy in 2016 if we rely on the evolution of GDP in purchasing power parity, an indicator which takes into account the purchasing power of different currencies .
But Beijing has never publicly welcomed this crossing of curves. As recalled The echoesthe head of the National Bureau of Statistics even questioned the estimates at the time, assuring that China’s priority was to eradicate poverty in the countryside and become a “middle-income society in 2020”.
It must be said that measured per capita, Chinese GDP in purchasing power parity ($21,476 in 2022) remains well below that of the United States ($76,399).
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