【英文】哈佛大学肯尼迪学院报告：巨大的经济竞争：中国对美国（56页）

英文研究报告 2022年04月13日 07:53 管理员

Recognizing this reality, over the past decade, the CIA and the IMF have concluded that there is a better yardstick than MER for comparing national economies: purchasing power parity (PPP). PPP compares national economies in terms of how much each nation can buy with its own currency at the prices items sell for in its market. Explaining its decision to switch from MER to PPP in its annual assessment of national economies, the CIA noted that “GDP at the ofcial exchange rate substantially understates the actual level of China’s output vis-a-vis the rest of the world.” Tus, in its view, PPP “provides the best available starting point for comparisons of economic strength and wellbeing between economies.”29 Te IMF adds that “market rates are more volatile and using them can produce quite large swings in aggregate measures of growth even when growth rates in individual countries are stable.”

Using PPP, we can compare the relative weight of the American and Chinese economies as if they were two competitors on opposite ends of a seesaw. Te conclusion is as obvious as it is painful. When measured by PPP, in 2000, China’s economy was 36% the size of the United States’. In 2020, the IMF found it was 115% the size of the U.S. economy, or one-seventh larger.31 While Presidents Obama, Trump, and now Biden have talked about a historic “pivot” to Asia, the seesaw has shifed to the point that both of America’s feet are dangling entirely of the ground.When this century began, China was knocking on the door of the WTO and the U.S. was the leading trading partner of most major economies. Today, China has overtaken the U.S. to become the largest trading partner for nearly every major nation.32 Illustrated by the graphic on the following page, by 2018, 130 countries traded more with China than they did with the U.S., and more than two-thirds of those countries traded more than twice as much with China.33 With the launch of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in January, China has also now surpassed the U.S. as the leader of the world’s largest free trade block.