The rise of China and India, by numbers

We’re used to seeing growth forecasts for the next few years, but here’s an altogether rarer beast: forecasts stretching all the way to 2050. They were released by PricewaterhouseCoopers last night, and I thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate seeing them in graph form. Naturally, slap health warnings aplenty across this – economists barely know what will happen this year, let alone decades hence – but some of the trends are still pretty striking. Here’s a round-up:

1. This first graph suggests that – allowing for the relative values of different currencies – China’s GDP will top the US’s around 2020. India’s does likewise just before the 2050 endpoint:

2. The picture for each country’s GDP as a percentage of the world economy is more eye-catching still. Here, the US drops consistently from now until 2050, while China and India rise inexorably:

3. But it’s not all about China and India overtaking the West.