Senior fellow Charles Kenny's weekly Foreign Policy blog on the economic decline of the West.
From the Article
The latest data on economic growth released this year by the World Bank confirms what we all already knew: The United States and most of the West had a pretty grim decade between the turn of the millennium and 2010. It's a well-worn story now, a decade bookended by bursting bubbles, with limping, debt-financed progress in between. But there is a lot of good news elsewhere in the bank's assessment of gross domestic product (GDP) growth around the globe: Over the same period, 19 economies doubled in size. Both the causes and consequences of that growth varied considerably, but one thing is clear -- the United States would have been even worse off without it.
The U.S. economy itself expanded by 18 percent from the decade's start to end, ahead of Britain (15 percent), Germany, and Japan (both less than 10 percent). Ranking the 164 countries for which the World Bank has data on GDP growth over the decade, that means the United States came 134th, with Britain, Germany, and Japan in 140th, 154th, and 155th place, respectively. Even the apparent U.S. lead in this category of slimeless snails was partially devoured by a faster growing population, so incomes per head increased by around 1 percent a year in all four countries. (Iraq placed dead last in the global ranking -- surely another blow to the reputation of American economic leadership.)
At the same time, the top 19 countries in the world in terms of decade-long growth saw their GDPs more than double over the ten years from 2000 to 2010. And that top 19 included some really big countries -- not least India and China -- so nearly 2.6 billion people benefited from all of that economic dynamism.