China’s Economic Growth 1978-2025: What We Know Today about China’s Economic Growth Tomorrow

Carsten Holz

Development and Comp Systems from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Views of the future China vary widely. While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the U.S. This paper examines the economic growth prospects of China over the next two decades. Extrapolating past real GDP growth rates into the future, the size of the Chinese economy surpasses that of the U.S. in purchasing power terms between 2012 and 2015; by 2025, China is likely to be the world's largest economic power by almost any measure. The extrapolations are supported by two types of considerations. First, China’s growth patterns of the past 25 years since the beginning of economic reforms match well those identified by standard economic development and trade theories (structural change, catching up, and factor price equalization). Second, decomposing China’s GDP growth into growth of labor and other variables, the near-certain information available today about the quantity and quality of Chinese laborers through 2015, if not several years after, allows inferences about future GDP growth. Short of some cataclysmic event, demographics alone suggests China’s continued economic rise. If talent is randomly distributed in the world population and if agglomeration of talent is important, then the odds are strongly in China’s favor.

Keywords: economic growth; growth accounting; growth forecasts; development theories; human capital formation; education (all: China) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J11 O1 O10 O11 O3 O4 O40 O47 O53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-12-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-dev, nep-for and nep-tra
Note: Type of Document - pdf
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Journal Article: China's Economic Growth 1978-2025: What We Know Today About China's Economic Growth Tomorrow (2008)
Working Paper: China’s Economic Growth 1978-2025: What We Know Today about China’s Economic Growth Tomorrow (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpdc:0512002

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