This month, the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) published a study, “The Future of Global Economic Power,” looking all the way to 2100. It follows an analytical framework very similar to that of our BRICs analysis, and its main scenario still concludes that China will become the world’s largest economy by the end of the century, with another BRIC country, India, in second place. But there are two other scenarios with less favorable paths of productivity growth. In one of them, India, not China, is the world’s largest economy by 2100. And in the second, productivity falls short of the path of the past three decades, as it has in recent years, and China’s share of global GDP declines notably.
One can only hope that whoever Xi surrounds himself with in the coming years takes the NBER report to heart.
Jim O’Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a former U.K. treasury minister, is a member of the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development.