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Future economic heavyweights

November 9, 2012

China and India are expected to become the economic superpowers of the not-too-distant future, the OECD says in a new study. The West will quickly fall behind, and so will Germany despite its strong industrial base.

https://p.dw.com/p/16gHQ
A worker works at a production line belonging to Tsingtao Brewery in China
Image: picture-alliance/dpa

The size of the Chinese economy will surpass the entire eurozone's gross domestic product by the end of this year, claimed a Friday report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of 34 industrialized and mostly western democracies.

And that would only be the beginning of a huge shift in global economic power as a number of emerging countries looked set to take over the lead, the study maintained.

The OECD said the Chinese and Indian economies together would be bigger than the combined economic might of the US, Japan and the 17-member eurozone. China on its own was predicted to race past the US to become the world's biggest economy in 2030 at the latest.

Germany at the losing end

By that time, China and India together would account for 39 percent of global output, compared with 34 percent for the US, Japan and the euro area.

The report also noted that China would have the highest growth rate of any country for another eight years to come, before being overtaken by India and Indonesia due to a fast-ageing population in China.

For Germany, the OECD painted anything but a rosy picture in terms of future economic developments. It said the country, alongside Luxembourg and Austria, would have to suffer the greatest loss of economic importance in the decades to come.

While Germany currently has the world's fifth largest economy after the US, China, Japan and India, the report said it would be overtaken by Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and France by 2060, meaning that Germany's share in global output would dip to just 2.0 percent, down from 4.8 percent at the moment.

hg/rc (dpa, Reuters)