"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable," said John Kenneth Galbraith, the wisest American economist of his generation. ("A paltry honor," he would have murmured.) But you still can't resist wondering when the Chinese economy will be bigger than the U.S. economy — or the Brazilian bigger than the British, or the Turkish bigger than the Italian — as if it were some kind of horse race.
The latest document to tackle these questions is "The World in 2050," drawn up by HSBC bank, which ranks the world's hundred biggest economies as they are now, and as (it thinks) they will be in 2050. It contains the usual little surprises, like a prediction that per capita incomes in the Philippines and Indonesia, now roughly the same, will diverge so fast that the average Filipino will have twice the income of the average Indonesian by 2050.
The Venezuelan economy will only triple in size, but Peru's economy will grow eightfold. Per capita income will a bit more than double in Nigeria; in Ethiopia it will grow sixfold. Bangladesh powers past Pakistan, with a per capita income in 2050 that's half again as big as Pakistan's. (It's only two-thirds of Pakistan's at the moment.) And so on and so forth: local phenomena mostly of interest to local people.
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