China to dethrone US as world’s biggest economy sooner than we'd predicted, expert group says

26 Dec, 2020 09:13 / Updated 4 years ago

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) expects that China’s economy will outshine that of the US by 2028, half a decade sooner than it had previously forecast.

According to a report from the UK-based consultancy group, the country’s quick rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic will generate a two-percent growth in 2020, while the US is expected to contract by five percent. China's economy, when measured in dollars, is set to narrow the gap with its biggest rival.

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At the same time, the CEBR report suggests that global gross domestic product (GDP) would drop 4.4 percent, marking the biggest year-on-year decline since the second world war.

“The big news in this forecast is the speed of growth of the Chinese economy. We expect it to become an upper-income economy during the current five-year plan period (2020-25). And we expect it to overtake the US a full five years earlier than we did a year ago,” the CEBR’s deputy chairman Douglas McWilliams said.

China’s share of global GDP has reportedly expanded from 3.6 percent in 2000 to 17.8 percent in 2019 and will continue to grow. The country is expected to pass the $12,536 mark in per-capita income, which will help it to join the club of high-income nations by 2023. However, living standards in China will reportedly remain lower than in western countries. In the US, the average per-capita income stands at $63,000.

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“Other Asian economies are also shooting up the league table. One lesson for western policymakers, who have performed relatively badly during the pandemic, is that they need to pay much more attention to what is happening in Asia, rather than simply looking at each other,” McWilliams said.

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