We all know that the world’s economic centre of gravity is moving east as India and China grow rapidly, but Danny Quah of the London School of Economics has managed to draw a map of it.
The map above (via William Easterly and the New York Times’ Economix blog) shows the gradual movement of the average location of economic activity eastward. As Mr Shah’s paper puts it:
The article finds that in 1980 the global economy’s centre of gravity was mid-Atlantic. By 2008, from the continuing rise of China and the rest of East Asia, that centre of gravity had drifted to a location east of Helsinki and Bucharest. Extrapolating growth in almost 700 locations across Earth, this article projects the world’s economic centre of gravityto locate by 2050 literally between India and China. Observed from Earth’s surface, that economic centre of gravity will shift from its 1980 location 9,300 km or 1.5 times the radius of the planet.
Even though we knew it, it is fascinating to see it visualised.
