[Serious] When will China exceed the US in aggregate nominal GDP?

[Heraclitus]

Watching predictions in the past 20 years seems that people have consistently underestimated China. Not to recently there was talk of China surpassing the US in 2040. Then Goldman Sachs amended that prediction to 2027. There is now talk of 2020 as being that year.

Emboldened by this trend and the good fundamental characteristics of the Chinese population's potential I'm going to be bold.

I think that by 2018 China will beat the US on this metric. Feel free to criticize this estimate. Please vote in the poll and share your opinion. Comments are welcomed!

PS: I personally think the first and last option are a bit crazy, sure China is doing great but it can't grow and the US can't decline fast enough for this to happen by 2012, of course in PPP terms this is a perfectly reasonable estimate (it may already be true). 2012-2015 also seems like a huge stretch. China may well enter difficulties that set it back decades but I really can't imagine a scenario except China breaking up into states too small (under 270 million people) to imagine a future where at least one nation in that region does not at one point surpass the US in this metric.

I also think China won't need much time after that to beat the EU figure, unless they are really slow and weird things happen in the first half of this young century.

[Tupac Shakur]

Someday...

[Heraclitus]

Someday...

Someday India will surpas the US in GDP, I was hoping for more specific guestimates.

[Al B. Sure!]

So what? China will still be a ****hole with most of its population in poverty.

[Provost Harrison]

I second Albert...if you have 5 times the population of the next "richest" country, you only need a fifth of the wealth per capita to surpass it. Strength in numbers. Currently a decent standard of living is only provided to a very small proportion of the population, and I can't see that changing massively.

[Heraclitus]

So what? China will still be a ****hole with most of its population in poverty.

Political and cultural power will eventually follow economic power.


Why do both of you seem to think growth will stop after surpassing the US? I think China will have a PPP GDP per capita about 70% that of the (future) US by 2040 (for reference today Japan has about 2/3 of the US GDP per capita and countries like Portugal have less than half yet are still counted as pretty good places to live).

[giblets]

Assuming China continues growing at 9% and US at 3%, it would take 18 years or so. So I went with 2020-2030.

[Al B. Sure!]

Political and cultural power will eventually follow economic power.


Why do both of you seem to think growth will stop after surpassing the US? I think China will have a PPP GDP per capita about 70% that of the (future) US by 2040 (for reference today Japan has about 2/3 of the US GDP per capita and countries like Portugal have less than half yet are still counted as pretty good places to live).

When you're looking 20+ years down the line, using current trends starts turning into hogwash. Who knows what the world would be like in 2030 or 2040 or 2050.

Wow Hera. Always editing your posts.

[giblets]

I think that by 2018 China will beat the US on this metric.

2018 is pretty silly because even if the US economy were to stop growing, China would have to grow at 14% a year to overcome the US by then. Unless you think the US is on the verge of collapse?

[Heraclitus]

I think the US will see stagnation from late 2011 and eventually noticeable decline beyond 2013, however it wouldn't describe it as collapse. I also expect China to get back to +10% growth by 2011 and continue to hold this until then.

I more or less expect the US government to mismanage their economy under increasing pressure in the following years, the bloat of government and debt ensure this.


There are other scenarios I find plausible that have a similar result. Regardless I would put about 30% probability for 2018 being the year, I would also put 25% on 2022 and 20% on 2027 if I was a betting men.

[Al B. Sure!]

Bah. Why would the US decline and China accelerate? Why wouldn't China be the one that slows? South Korea and Japan slowed significantly.

[giblets]

Bah. Why would the US decline and China accelerate? Why wouldn't China be the one that slows? South Korea and Japan slowed significantly.

They did that when they got close to the US in terms of per capita GDP, which China is nowhere near doing.

[Al B. Sure!]

They did that when they got close to the US in terms of per capita GDP, which China is nowhere near doing.

Wrong.

According to data compiled by the late economic historian Angus Maddison and cited by Morgan Stanley, about 40 economies have attained a per capita GDP level of $7,000 over the past century or so.

Remarkably, the average growth rate of 31 of those 40 countries was 2.8 percentage points less in the decade after the $7,000 inflection point was reached than in the preceding decade.

Japan and South Korea hit the $7,000 mark around 1969 and 1988, whereupon their annual average GDP growth rates decelerated in the following decade by 4.1 and 2.4 percentage points respectively, Morgan Stanley calculates.

China is just under the $7000 mark. What do you think will happen?

[Provost Harrison]

The point is though, China is growing so well because of their manufacture of cheap sh*t...once wages increase a lot and their sh*t isn't so cheap, their economic growth will slow...from my perspective they don't hold anything else in their favour. At least India have a high level of scientific and technological expertise and output that China really need to look at matching.

[MOBIUS]

Surely the exact time that China surpasses the US can be worked out by the slantiness of their eyes, Hera...?