Global Changes

From 1960 to 2020, the world economy has grown at an average annual rate of 3.5% in real terms. This is an unusual rate in history, since it means that world income doubles every 20 years. But the global picture shows that this high world growth has been unevenly distributed, as illustrated in the table below, which shows the evolution of the weight in world GDP of the main countries and regions of the world.

The changes are very significant. The main one is that there is a global rebalancing in favor of Asia and to the detriment of the West. This historical trend explains to a large extent the conflictive geopolitical situation and some of the crises we are experiencing in our time. Investigating the causes and consequences of this transformation is essential to understand this first part of the 21st century. GATE will be engaged in this task.