When will China’s GDP overtake America’s?

To read more of The Economist’s data journalism visit our Graphic Detail page.

TWENTY YEARS ago China’s economy was only 14% as big as America’s (at market exchange rates). But it was not too soon for bold economists to begin speculating about when China’s GDP might eclipse America’s to become the largest in the world. In an influential paper published in 2003, Goldman Sachs, a bank, predicted that the decisive year would be 2041. By the time of the global financial crisis in 2007-09, that forecast looked timid. The gap between China and America had narrowed much faster than expected, because of America’s wobbles, China’s resilient growth and the steady appreciation of the yuan. By 2010, China’s GDP was 40% the size of America’s. Goldman Sachs brought the date of the eclipse forward from the early 2040s to the late 2020s. This newspaper was even less cautious. That year it created an interactive chart, which allowed readers to make their own predictions of when China would overtake America, based on readers’ assumptions for growth, inflation and the exchange rate. Our “default” assumptions implied that China’s moment of economic triumph could arrive as early as 2019.