(17 September 2021) Data from international organizations such as the U.N. and the International Monetary Fund shows that in the last five decades global economic growth decelerated by almost 50%—from an average 3.9% growth per year in the 1970s to an average 2.3% growth in the 2010s.

Current trends in labor, capital, and productivity—the major drivers of economic growth—suggest deceleration will continue long term.

  • Data from the U.N. shows that the global annual growth of population ages 15–64 (which constitutes the labor force) decelerated from 2.2% in 1970 to less than 1% in 2020. And according to U.N. projections, in the next few decades labor force growth will decelerate even further.
  • The impact of capital on global growth can be indirectly estimated through the share of fixed capital investment in world GDP. According to the World Bank, between 1970 and 2019 share of investment in world GDP declined from 25.5% to 23.8%. Typically, the lower the investment to GDP ratio, the slower the economic growth, since the volume of resources allocated for the creation of new production capacities is decreasing relative to final consumption.
  • Global productivity growth has also been declining since 1970. In the 1980s and 1990s the decline of productivity in developed countries was counterbalanced by rising productivity in emerging economies (mainly in China) as result of industrialization, but in the 2010s growth of productivity in China slowed down as well, now that basic infrastructure and industries have been built. There is still potential for productivity gains in India, but India is unlikely to make up for the slowdown in productivity growth in both developed countries and China.

Coronavirus Data and Insights

Live data and insights on Coronavirus around the world, including detailed statistics for the US, EU, and China — confirmed and recovered cases, deaths, alternative data on economic activities, customer behavior, supply chains, and more.

رؤى ذات صلة من Knoema

The World's Largest Economy: China vs United States

Which is the world's largest economy, China or the United States? As is usual in the field of economics, “It depends.” It depends on the methods used to estimate the size of an economy and to compare one economy to another. Despite modern discussions on refining the calculation of gross domestic product (GDP), the standard measure of an economy’s size and performance, to be more inclusive of economic factors that have been ignored to date, such as environmental and natural resource depletion, there is no commonly accepted alternative to GDP. There are, however, at least two commonly...

How Deep an Economic Decline Can the World Expect in 2020?

For the first time during the post World War II era, the global economy is expected to shrink due to measures in force worldwide to suppress the coronavirus, according to the IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) released on April 14, 2020. In this edition of the WEO, the IMF shortened the forecast horizon to 2021 instead of the expected 2025 horizon and limited the number of indicators available in its statistical tables because of the high level of uncertainty in current global economic conditions. In the baseline scenario—which assumes that the pandemic fades in the second half of...

Wages and the Famous Big Mac: How Far Does Your Income Go?

It sounds like a riddle: how many Big Macs for your entire daily wage? Granted, many of our readers may not even have access to a Big Mac where they live (not to mention those who wouldn’t buy Big Macs if they were vegetarian, among other reasons). So, why is the Big Mac Index from the Economist a well-known concept around the world? It’s simple: Big Macs are easier for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population to understand as opposed to economic concepts like “GDP per capita in purchasing power parities,” which is a mouthful and a complicated concept. The answer to the...

The Shadow Economy in Europe and OECD Countries in 2003-2015

The $9.7 trillion global shadow economy is the second largest economy in the world after the United States, according to the 2010 estimates of the black market for 162 countries. Still, as for the more recent study, the size of the underground economy in European and other OECD countries have been decreasing steadily since 2009 and continued shrinking in 2015 averaging to 16.7 percent of official GDP. But this development was not uniform across individual countries: 10 out of 36 OECD countries experienced an increase in the black market size in 2015. The most significant upsurge of...