ABSTRACT
For 500 years, from the fourteenth century until the 1830s China accounted for a remarkable 30 per cent of world economic output. That is more than the US economy at the height of its global economic dominance after World War II – sustained for a half-millennium! But by 1979 . . . China’s share of global GDP was barely 1 per cent . . . Today China accounts for about 5 per cent of world output.
