China’s economy will increasingly rely on state investment, high-tech development and domestic consumption – with less input from its past staple of export manufacturing – as it stands to overtake the United States in the coming decade, analysts predict.
China’s GDP should grow 5.7% per year through 2025 and then 4.7% annually until 2030, British consultancy Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) forecasts. Its forecast says that China, now the world’s second-largest economy, would overtake the No. 1-ranked U.S. economy by 2030. Credit insurance firm Euler Hermes made a similar forecast.
China’s Economy Could Overtake US Economy by 2030
by Ralph Jennings
https://www.voanews.com/a/chinas-economy-could-overtake-us-economy-by-2030/6380892.html
China’s economy will increasingly rely on state investment, high-tech development and domestic consumption – with less input from its past staple of export manufacturing – as it stands to overtake the United States in the coming decade, analysts predict.
China’s GDP should grow 5.7% per year through 2025 and then 4.7% annually until 2030, British consultancy Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) forecasts. Its forecast says that China, now the world’s second-largest economy, would overtake the No. 1-ranked U.S. economy by 2030. Credit insurance firm Euler Hermes made a similar forecast.
Chinese leaders have pushed over the past decade to rely more on value-added services over traditional factory exports, state media have said. The Sino-U.S. trade dispute and early 2020 workplace closures due to COVID-19 have added pressure on manufacturing.
Reducing factory output in China, foreign multinationals have been expanding outside China, targeting places such as Vietnam to avoid rising wages and environmental compliance costs. By offshoring in multiple countries they hope to head off any repeat of China’s early 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns that shut down factories.
China’s economy totaled $15.92 trillion in 2020, and market research firm IHS Markit estimates that it reached $18 trillion last year on export manufacturing growth and capital for new projects. The U.S. economy reached about $23 trillion last year, the market research firm said.
State investment
The country that’s already known for fast economic growth over the past 20 years would see the state take more control over key sectors after intervening in several, including the internet, in 2021, economists expect.
“Beijing has the funds and the unfettered domestic political power to use China’s large public treasury to make strategic investments in the service of the leadership’s national and global objectives,” said Denny Roy, senior fellow at the East-West Center think tank in Honolulu.
China scored 2.98 in 2018, up from 2.45 eight years earlier and approaching about three times the world average, on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development policy forum’s Direct Control Over Enterprises index.
That means the government’s direct control over enterprises “well exceeded the open economy average” and “reflects China’s increasing emphasis on the role of the state in the economy under Xi Jinping,” the think tank Atlantic Council says in its October report China Pathfinder: Annual Scorecard .
Growth in tech hardware
Chinese leaders will probably prioritize tech, especially hardware that does not require constant innovation, as a growth engine, economists say.
State intervention in the internet sector won’t hobble expansion in semiconductors and infrastructure software, said Zennon Kapron, founder and director of the Shanghai-based financial industry research firm Kapronasia.
“If the country does become self-sufficient in terms of technology and then is able to sell and export those products and services that are based on the technology, then that would be a huge bump to its economy, because [that] is a key driver certainly of the U.S. GDP now,” Kapron said.
The U.S. economy will keep growing but without spurts through 2030, Kapron predicts.
China has a “huge base of engineers,” albeit less creativity than it needs to foster the “zany ideas” that drive development of new technology, said Douglas McWilliams, founder and executive deputy chairman of CEBR.
Consumer spending
Domestic spending has driven most of China’s economic growth before 2021 as the country reduced its exposure to the world in view of the Sino-U.S. trade dispute, McKinsey & Co. says in its China consumer report 2021. Supply chains have “matured and localized, and its innovation capabilities were enhanced” in turn, McKinsey & Co says.
That trend is likely to continue despite hits to income under lockdowns during the first year of COVID-19, analysts say. China’s population exceeds that of the United States by 3.5 times, though American consumers are wealthier on average.
“In the past five years, domestic consumption has … become a more significant growth driver as China’s domestic consumer market has grown dramatically in size,” said Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist with IHS Markit.
Beijing’s leadership “aims to create more than 11 million new urban jobs and expand domestic demand and effective investment,” the official Xinhua News Agency said in mid-2021. Those measures, it said, “are expected to put the economy firmly back to pre-pandemic vibrancy.”
What if China overtakes US economy?
Status as the world’s largest economy does not confer any automatic advantages over others, economists said, but countries dependent on the Chinese economy would take note.
“There is no gold medal or anything like that,” CEBR’s McWilliams told VOA. “But when you’ve got more money to spend, you do have the ability to influence things, and China will have that ability to influence things.”
China would be better placed, he said, to advance its Belt and Road Initiative, a 9-year-old effort aimed at building land and sea trade routes through Asia, Europe and Africa in the form of infrastructure projects and investments.
Officials in Beijing are already leveraging their economy in disputes with other countries, said Roy of the East-West Center. China vies with four Southeast Asian governments over maritime sovereignty, contests a group of islets with Japan and has gotten into territorial standoffs with India since 2017.
“The result of that expectation (China surpassing the United States economically) has been a bolder PRC (People’s Republic of China) foreign policy that seeks to settle regional disputes in China’s favor and to de-legitimize U.S. regional and global leadership under the assumption that China is destined to set the new rules of international relations,” Roy said.
China’s economy will not overtake the US until 2060, if ever
The consensus that Beijing can achieve whatever target it sets ignores the pace of slowdown in recent years
by Ruchir Sharma
https://www.ft.com/content/cff42bc4-f9e3-4f51-985a-86518934afbe
As he embarks on a third term, Xi Jinping’s goal is to make China a mid-level developed country in the next decade, which implies that the economy will need to expand at a rate of around 5 per cent. But underlying trends — bad demographics, heavy debt and declining productivity growth — suggest the country’s overall growth potential is about half that rate.
The implications of China growing at 2.5 per cent have yet to be fully digested anywhere, including Beijing. For one thing, assuming that the US grows at 1.5 per cent, with similar rates of inflation and a stable exchange rate, China would not overtake America as the world’s largest economy until 2060, if ever.
Growth in the long term depends on more workers using more capital, and using it more efficiently (productivity). China, with a shrinking population and declining productivity growth, has been growing by injecting more capital into the economy at an unsustainable rate.
China is now a middle-income country, a stage when many economies naturally start to slow given the higher base. Its per capita income is currently $12,500, one-fifth that of the US. There are 38 advanced economies today, and all of them grew past the $12,500 income level in the decades after the second world war — most quite gradually. Only 19 grew at 2.5 per cent or faster for the next 10 years, and did so with a boost from more workers; on average the working age population grew at 1.2 per cent a year. Only two (Lithuania and Latvia) had a shrinking workforce.
China is an outlier. It would be the first large middle-income country to sustain 2.5 per cent gross domestic product growth despite working-age population decline, which began in 2015. And in China this decline is precipitous, on track to contract at an annual rate of nearly 0.5 per cent in the coming decades. Then there’s the debt. In the 19 countries that sustained 2.5 per cent growth after reaching China’s current income level, debt (including government, households and businesses) averaged 170 per cent of GDP. None had debts nearly as high as China’s.
Before the 2008 crisis, China’s debts held steady at about 150 per cent of GDP; afterwards it began pumping out credit to boost growth, and debts spiked to 220 per cent of GDP by 2015. Debt binges normally lead to a sharp slowdown, and China’s economy did decelerate in the 2010s, but only from 10 per cent to 6 per cent — less dramatically than past patterns would predict.
China avoided a deeper slowdown thanks to a tech sector boom and, more importantly, by issuing more debt. Total debt is up to 275 per cent of GDP, and much of it funded investment in the property bubble, where all too much of it went to waste.
Though capital — largely property investment — helped pump up GDP growth, productivity growth fell by half to 0.7 per cent last decade. The efficiency of capital collapsed. China now has to invest $8 to generate $1 of GDP growth, twice the level a decade ago, and the worst of any major economy.
In this situation, 2.5 per cent growth will be an achievement. Sustaining basic productivity growth of 0.7 per cent will barely offset population decline. To hit 5 per cent GDP growth, China would need capital growth rates near those of the 2010s. Most of that money went into physical infrastructure: roads, bridges and housing. Given the scale of the housing bust, it’s likely overall capital growth will fall back to about 2.5 per cent.
Of course, the consensus is that China can achieve whatever target the government sets, but consensus forecasts have fallen short of recognising the pace of China’s slowdown in recent years, including this one, when growth is likely to fall below 3 per cent. Around 2010, many prominent forecasters thought China’s economy was going to overtake the US’s in nominal terms by 2020.
By 2014, some economists were claiming that China already was the world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity — a construct based on theoretical currency values with no meaning in the real world. These theoreticians argued that the yuan was grossly undervalued and bound to appreciate against the dollar, revealing the dominance of China’s economy.
Instead, the Chinese currency depreciated, and its economy is still a third smaller than the US’s in nominal terms. If anything, 2.5 per cent is an optimistic forecast that plays down the risks to growth, including growing tensions between China and its major trade partners, growing government interference in the most productive private sector — technology — and mounting concerns about the debt load.
China at 2.5 per cent growth has major implications for its ambitions as an economic, diplomatic and military superpower. A lesser China is more likely than the world yet realises.
(sk)
アメリカは2030年までに中国に抜かれる。いや、2060年になっても抜かれない。
予測なんて、そんなものだ。