ABSTRACT
The economic impact of that growth, both domestically and internationally, soon became a subject of great interest. That interest was heightened by the fact that China's economic growth would be a major factor underpinning its success in other domains including its political legitimacy, its capacity to address environmental concerns. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1996 considered three possibilities for the following 15 to 20 years: an optimistic outcome with continuation of a 9 percent growth trajectory, a less favourable performance causing growth to fall to 4 or 5 percent, and a mixed outcome leading to growth of only 5 to 6 percent. The World Bank estimated that China's middle class would increase from 56 million in 2007 to 361 million in 2030. In 2008, Angus Maddison and Harry Wu noted that the World Bank had recently issued new multinational PPP comparisons that indicated that China's GDP in 2005 was only 43 percent of the US.
