Putting China’s Economic Power in Perspective

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

The original article was taken from the New York Times at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/putting-chinas-economic-power-in-perspective/?ref=china

You guys are welcome to comment the issues covered in the article under the main thread.

In January, David Leonhardt noted a finding that more Americans said China was the world’s leading superpower than said the United States was. New global survey data from Pew Research Center suggests this view is becoming more widespread around the world — although, tellingly, not in China itself.

Pew conducted annual surveys in 14 different countries by telephone or through face-to-face interviews from 2008 to 2012, and asked about which country was considered to be the leading superpower. Economic awe for China surpassed that for the United States in the last year:



Not all people in all countries feel this way, of course.

Here’s a breakdown, by country, of responses to the question when it was asked this spring. The left column shows which country was answering the question, and the rows show what percentage of respondents in that country said the United States, China, Japan or the European Union is the world’s leading economic power.



Since that post in January, Americans have actually become about as likely to name their own country as the world’s leading economic power as they are to name China (40 percent naming the United States, 41 percent China).

But as you can see, it’s primarily the developed world that views China as the greater juggernaut. Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece and the Czech Republic are among the countries whose populations are more likely to say China’s economic power has eclipsed America’s.

Now look at the developing world. In most of these countries — Turkey, Tunisia, Pakistan, India, Brazil and Mexico — respondents were significantly more likely to rate the United States as more economically powerful than China.

Even in China — where you might expect patriotism to buoy citizens’ assessments of their economy — respondents were far more likely to say the United States rather than China is the world’s leading economic power (48 percent said the United States was most powerful, and 29 percent named China).

Why might the Chinese feel this way, when their growth rate was four times ours last quarter?

Because that spectacular Chinese growth is coming from a very low base, as William Easterly, a development economist at New York University, reminds us in a related post. Additionally, the country’s overall wealth is divided among a gigantic population.
Put those factors together and you get a country where incomes are growing quickly, but most people are still very poor. The typical person is going from really poor to somewhat less poor. The gross domestic product per capita in China was $8,400 in 2011; in the United States, it was nearly six times that, at $48,100.

People in China (and the rest of the developing world) know that their living standards are lower than Americans’, and that American consumers and American economic leadership still have vast sway over what happens in the poorer corners of the world. On the other hand, people in the developed world read about sky-high economic growth and the country’s displacement of workers in rich countries, and believe China is already the biggest economic power.

Of course, economic “power” could be judged by other things besides wealth — such as the ability to keep the world economy from blowing up. In that case, the one-sixth of Germans who named the European Union as the world’s biggest economic power are probably correct.