西北剿匪记电视剧擒狼:The Return of China - NYTimes.com

March 26, 2010The Return of China
ByCATHERINE RAMPELL
In the coming decades China will likelysurpass United States as the world’s biggest economy.That may seem strange and uncomfortable to many Americans, but itwouldn’t be the first time China dominated the global economy.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Factblog hasposted a fascinating set of statistics showing the evolution of the Chinese economy, compiled by economic historian  Angus Maddison.
Source: Angus Maddison, via O.E.C.D.
The chart above shows the percentage of the world’s economycontributed by China during the last two centuries. As you can see,China held a far bigger share of the world’s economy in 1820 than itdoes today. From the early 19th century until the mid-20th century,China’s share of global output fell steadily, troughing at about 4percent of world G.D.P. in the 1960s.
The United States, on the other hand, constituted a mere pittance ofworld output in the early days of the republic, and then grew steadilyup until the Great Depression. It shot up during World War II, and thenbegan to decline and eventually flatten out over the subsequent decades:
Source: Angus Maddison, via O.E.C.D.
How to explain these trends?
As the O.E.C.D.’s Jérome Cukier notes, a country’s share of worldoutput was, until about 200 years ago, strongly correlated with acountry’s population size. This partially explained why China, with itshuge population, took up so much of the world economy for so long.
But then factors like “colonization, innovation and openness to tradeand capital flows” helped change things, Mr. Cukier writes, andeconomic size began to divorce itself from population size. Westerncountries shot ahead of China in their share of global economy throughmuch of the last century. Until, that is, China began to catch up andeventually outpace its competitors in the development game morerecently.
In other words, China’s plentiful and cheap labor is only part of thekey to its rapid growth in the last few decades; what appears to havereally made the difference, not surprisingly, is its greater economicinteraction with the rest of the world.
To compare the shares of world economy held by different countriesand regions, click the interactive chart below. (Control-click to layerdifferent countries’ trends on top of each other.)
Shares of World Economy, 1820-2001

Visualization for Line Graph
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