Because of its high growth rates, many people call China the locomotive of global growth. Especially the International Monetary Fund thinks China contributes more to global growth than any other economy.
“We forecast China to contribute more than before to global output, even though growth is slowing. For exporters, this means China’s expanding market will continue to be a great source of future customers,” the IMF states. According to its calculations, China should add around 1 percentage point to world growth (bringing it to around 4 percent) in the coming years.
However, the argument, like many in economics, is at least semantically flawed. It goes like this: China’s share of global GDP was 16.6 percent in 2014. If it grows 10 percent, it will add 1.66 points to the world total of 100, thus contributing 1.66 percentage points to global growth.
But this is only true if one sees all the different countries in the world as one, which some people say the IMF would like to see in the not too distant future.
If that was the case, a China growing at 10 percent would really add to 1.66 percentage points to the world total. At the time of this publication, however, there were still 188 different countries on the IMF’s member list.
