The Third Largest Economy

Honestly, I'm surprised that Germany held on to the world's third-largest GDP for as long as it did.

From Bloomberg:

Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) -- China’s economy overtook Germany’s in 2007 to become the world’s third largest, underscoring the nation’s increasing economic and political clout.

Gross domestic product expanded 13 percent from a year earlier, more than a previous estimate of 11.9 percent, to 25.731 trillion yuan ($3.38 trillion), the statistics bureau said on its Web site today. That topped Germany’s 2.424 trillion euros ($3.32 trillion), using average exchange rates for 2007.

China’s economy is 70 times bigger than when leader Deng Xiaoping ditched hard-line Communist policies in favor of free- market reforms in 1978. After overtaking the U.K. and France in 2005, China became the third nation to complete a spacewalk, hosted the Olympic Games and surpassed Japan as the biggest buyer of U.S. Treasuries.

“This number is just one more piece of evidence that China is one of the most important players on the global stage,” said Huang Yiping, chief Asia economist at Citigroup Inc. in Hong Kong.

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It's interesting that Japan and Germany have been the second and third best economies for such a long time. America used to be a lot better at reconstructing countries than it does today.

I've heard a lot of people say to me that China is going to overtake America's economy in the next few years. Many other Chinese people have conceded that it will in fact be some time before China's economy overtakes the US'. As the article states, the United States most likely has about twenty years left on the top.

Of course, considering that China has 1.3 billion people, it makes sense that China's economy should one day be on top.