DANIEL MOSS: What happens after China becomes the world's biggest economy?
'China’s economy is ascendant and will replace the U.S. as the largest around 2030. We don’t hear much about the next chapter.'
The U.S. economy will grow a bit faster than China. Huh? That’s not a typo. It’s one of the projections in a fascinating OECD paper sketching scenarios for the world through 2060. Other developments canvassed: China’s share of global output peaks in the 2030s and then declines while India’s slice keeps rising. Indonesia’s economy catches up to its population. The forecast for the U.S. to outstrip China is not a prediction of any economic miracle in America — just an acknowledgment that China has set itself up for a brutal demographic collapse. Shortly after China overtakes the U.S. economy in size, all the legacies of the one-child policy coalesce as the society seriously ages, stalling out the Middle Kingdom’s expansion. The U.S. will face demographic challenges, too, but nothing like this. Between 2030 and 2060, this paper projects, gross domestic product in the U.S. will grow at an average of just under 2 percent a year. Not too different from the past decade. China will expa...
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