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发帖数: 584 | 1 http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/14/did_chinas_econo
Did China's economy overtake the U.S. in 2010?
Just in time for Hu Jintao's visit to Washington next week, economist Arvind
Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics is coming
out with a new set of GDP estimates showing that the Chinese economy may
have actually surpassed the United States some time in 2010.
Subramanian's estimates rely on purchasing power parity (PPP) estimates,
which take differing labor costs in rich and poor countries into account.
While the IMF also produces PPP estimates, Subramanian believes these are
flawed, overstating price increases between 2005 and 2010 to the detriment
of China. Therefore:
The latest version of the Penn World Tables (version 7 to be released in
early February 2011) have corrected these biases, which result in an upward
revision for China’s PPP-based GDP by about 27 percent and for India by
about 13 percent for the year 2005. I use the new PWT corrections as the
starting point for computing new estimates for PPP-based GDP and GDP per
capita.
A second correction relates to developments between 2005 and 2010. For
this period, if the IMF data are taken at face value, they suggest an
increase in the real cost of living in China relative to that in the United
States (which is equivalent to a real appreciation of the Chinese currency)
of about 35 percent. This seems implausible because three alternative ways
of assessing currency changes point to a much smaller appreciation.[…]
These two adjustments increase China’s GDP from the current estimate of
$10.1 trillion to $14.8 trillion (an increase of 47 percent, of which 27
percent is due to the revision in the 2005 estimate, and the rest due to
smaller-than-assumed increases in the cost of living between 2005 and 2010).
This $14.8 trillion figure exceeds US GDP of $14.6 trillion. It must be
emphasized, of course, that the difference is small enough to be within the
margin of error.
Applying the same adjustments to GDP per capita increases the estimate
for China from $7,518 (the current estimate in the IMF’s World Economic
Outlook) to $11,047. The GDP per capita (the average standard of living) is
now about 4.3 times greater in the US than in China compared with a multiple
of 6.3 without my corrections (and compared with a multiple of 11 if GDP is
computed using market exchange rates).
Subramanian argued for FP in June that by discouraging high-skilled
immigration from countries like India, the United States was only taxing its
own international competitiveness. These new numbers should serve as a
stark reinforcement for that point.
According to official government figures, China's economy is still the
second largest, having overtaken Japan in the second quarter of last year. | t*****9
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