Surveys
The Centre Of Economic Gravity Continues To Shift Eastwards - CEBR
European economies such as France and Germany are seen losing ground to emerging economy countries such as India over the next decade, while in the short term the UK has leapfrogged France after the latter country hit wealthy individuals with new taxes, a report shows.
While league tables can sometimes be misleading indicators of citizens’ well being – much depends on methodology and the type of issues measured - the Centre for Economics and Business Research’s report helps underscore why wealth managers have been pushing into emerging market regions such as Asia in recent years.
The world’s three largest economies, the US, China and Japan, are forecast to remain in the three relative positions in the next 10 years, but by 222, the Chinese economy, currently 53 per cent of the size of the US economy, will be as big as 83 per cent, the CEBR report said.
The organisation’s World Economic League Table said that India’s economy, ranked 10th, will rank 4th in 2022, overtaking the UK, which will be in eighth place in that year (the UK is currently in sixth places).
In the case of Russia, another of the BRICs, it rose from 11th position in the rankings in 2010 to 9th in 2011 and is set to overtake western European countries and reach 7th spot by 2022.
But in an interesting twist within western Europe, the UK is set to overtake France, with the former country leapfrogging the latter either in 2013 or 2014 as euro difficulties and the French government’s taxes on the wealthy “drag France down”, according to Douglas McWilliams, CEBR’s chief executive.
“CEBR’s World Economic League Table shows the dramatic changes now taking place in the world’s economic geography with slow-growing European economies falling back and Asian economies, even though their growth is slowing, catching up,” he said.
The top 30 countries in the latest list are as follows: US, China, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Brazil, Italy, Russia, India, Canada, Australia, Spain, Mexico, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Iran, Belgium, Argentina, Poland, Taiwan, Austria, South Africa, Thailand.
