The world’s economic centre of gravity

One of the more irritating truisms of Tony Blair’s A Journey, and his standard globalisation speech, is that the centre of economic gravity is moving from west to east. But so it is, and here is the graphic:

It is produced by Danny Quah, professor in economics at the LSE, in the second issue of LSE Research, which will be published at the end of this month. His commentary:

This map depicts the dynamics of the global economy’s centre of gravity, the average location of economic activity across geographies on Earth. My calculations take into account all the GDP produced on this planet. I found in my research that in 1980 the global economy’s centre of gravity was in the mid-Atlantic. By 2008, as a result of the continuing rise of China and the rest of East Asia, the economic centre of gravity (ECG) had drifted to a location east of Helsinki and Bucharest. Extrapolating growth data in almost 700 locations across Earth, I have projected that by 2050 the world’s ECG will have shifted east 9,300 kilometres from its 1980 location – landing, appropriately enough, at a point between India and China.

I guess that the ECG is currently near that orange dot between Benghazi and Alexandria.

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