Visualizing the World's Shifting Economic Centre

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 10/11/2010 12:07:00 AM
From the latest issue of the LSE Research newsletter--which I will talk about more soon--comes interesting research in economic geography care of Danny Quah, head of our nation- and perhaps even world-leading Economics department and a fellow here at LSE IDEAS like a certain blogger you may know about ;-) Click for a larger image:

Danny Quah writes: This map depicts the dynamics of the global economy's centre of gravity, the average location of economic activity across geographies of the 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 dentre 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 [Finland] and Bucharest [Romania]. 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 hundred kilometres from its 1980 location--landing, appropriately enough, at a point between India and China.