What goes around, comes around
Yesterday, I was talking about the difficulty countries like the US, the UK or Germany face to close the gap in income between richer and poorer regions. This economic disparity between the countryside and London in the UK, or the East and West in Germany drives political polarisation and leads to calls to “Make America Great Again” as Donald Trump would say.
A couple of weeks ago, Caspar Sauter and Jean-Marie Grether from the University of Neuchatel and Nicole Andrea Mathys from the Federal Office for Spatial Development in Switzerland published a collection of beautiful maps that put these developments into a broader historical context. Using data for global population, GDP and CO2 emissions since 1820, they calculated the global centre of gravity for these three variables. The centre of gravity for GDP, for example, is the point on earth that is the weighted average of all the economic output produced in different countries around the world. This centre of gravity is many miles underground, but the map below shows where it is relative to the surface.
In the early 1800s the centre of gravity for global GDP was in Afghanistan, reflecting the economic power of China and Japan. With the industrial revolution the centre of gravity moved westwards at an accelerating speed and reached the Western Mediterranean at the end of the reign of Queen Victoria when the British Empire was at its peak. The destruction of the two World Wars and the rise of the US finally moved the centre of gravity to its most westwards point in the 1950s before a gradual shift to the East set in. I guess it is this time that Donald Trump and his supporters want to go back to when they talk about making America great again.
Thanks to the rise of China, the centre of gravity for GDP today is roughly back to where it was in 1870 and moving eastwards at an accelerating speed. This, of course brings tensions to the Western countries – tensions that Eastern countries experienced a hundred years ago. In the early twentieth century as the relative economic weight of countries like China, Russia and Turkey (or, rather, the Ottoman Empire) declined, political unrest shook up these countries. In China, the last Emperor was deposed and Chiang Kai-shek after much unrest formed a nationalist government in 1927. In Russia, Lenin and Trotsky deposed the Czar and formed the Soviet Union in 1917 while Mustafa Kemal Atatürk formed modern Turkey in 1923. While all of these revolutions had many different causes, the relative economic decline of these countries in the late 1800s and early 1900s contributed to public unrest because the ruling classes were increasingly unable to provide enough income for the poor to keep their dissatisfaction under wraps.
To me it is interesting that this relative economic decline did not favour one political side or another. In Russia, the communists gained power, while in China a right-wing nationalist government took over. And in Turkey, Atatürk arguably tried to form a democratic, almost technocratic country modelled on the West. What all these leaders had in common was a populist approach to politics that channelled widespread economic discontent. The populist movements in Europe follow in their footpaths. The rise of nationalism in Donald Trump’s America and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is a descendent of the nationalist movement of Chiang Kai-shek, while left-wing leaders like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders are avowed socialists (though clearly not communists). And Emmanuel Macron’s movement En Marche can be seen as a similar approach to centrist modernisation as Atatürk’s Turkey. Swings and roundabouts...
Centre of gravity for GDP
Source: Sauter et al. (2019).