ABSTRACT
This chapter can be summed up in a sentence: in terms of population, share of world output and a number of other measures, Europe has become smaller in relation to the world. The combined EU and United States’ share of world GDP has dropped from 60 per cent in 1990 to 45 per cent in 2012 (Copsey 2015: 157). An EU estimate has Europe and the United States in 2050 each making up a proportion of world GDP in the high teens, with China accounting for around a quarter and India a tenth. 1
Jószef Böröcz (2015) has also explored some future scenarios, with the ‘global economic weight’ (share of world GDP) of the EU and United States more or less static from 1950 to 2010 and India and China on the rise, each a few points above or below 10 per cent (Böröcz 2015: Figure 2.1 ). Extrapolating these trends to 2060, we find China way ahead, with something like a twothirds share, the United States with around a third, India catching up fast and the EU well below 10 per cent, even with its prospective enlargements taken into account (Böröcz 2015: Figure 2.2). His rather speculative alternative scenarios involve a fusion of the EU and the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) on the one hand, and with the former USSR on the other. Even these end up in 2060 somewhere between China and India: ‘none of the three scenarios offer a viable solution to the task of maintaining the geopolitical privileges enjoyed by the states, capital and citizens that constitute key stakeholders in European integration’ (Böröcz 2015: 32). For the moment, however, Western Europe, along with North America and Australia, is one of the three richest regions of the world. 2 As Chancellor Merkel pointed out in 2012, ‘If Europe today accounts for just over seven per cent of the world’s population,
produces around twenty-five per cent of global GDP and has to finance fifty per cent of global social spending, then it’s obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life’ (Peel 2012).
