In February, the 2023 financial war, the GDP of China and the United States will once again stage a fierce tug-of-war! According to the data, China's GDP increased by 5% year-on-year2% compared to 25% is much higher, and the growth rate is more than twice that of US imperialism. However, the cunning exchange rate and the soaring inflation rate in the United States have once again widened the gap between the GDP of the two countries, and China's total economy is only about 65% of that of the United States.
The significant widening of the GDP gap is mainly due to the continuous depreciation of the renminbi, which has led to the shrinkage of China's GDP after being converted into dollars. At the same time, the United States is mired in inflation, which has given a huge boost to its GDP growth. However, this is not the only reason, the difference in GDP between the two countries is both at the level of composition and is significantly reflected in the statistical methodology. Therefore, GDP can only be regarded as a rough comparative indicator.
Looking at the composition of the economy, the National Bureau of Statistics is accustomed to using gross domestic product (GDP) when publishing data, rather than directly talking about GDP, which means that China's GDP statistics use the production method. It is divided into three major industries: agriculture, industry and construction are the secondary industries, while the tertiary industries, which cover a wide range of distribution and service sectors.
Taking 2023 as an example, the added value of the primary industry will account for 7% of GDP12%, and the added value of the secondary industry accounted for 3828%, while the tertiary sector is as high as 546%。Compared with the United States, although it is the world's largest agricultural country, the proportion of agriculture is only 105%, and the agricultural population is less than 1% of the total population. China's agricultural population accounts for 3611%, which is slightly lower than the U.S. level, but still huge.
The U.S. secondary industry accounts for 1801%, the added value of manufacturing accounts for 11% of GDP. China's manufacturing industry has ranked first in the world for 14 consecutive years, and its output value is 1 of the United States78 times. Although the United States has outsourced low-end manufacturing, resulting in a decline in its proportion, the reshoring trend of manufacturing in the past two years has made its share recover slightly.
However, the real backbone of the U.S. economy lies in the tertiary sector, which accounts for more than 80 percent. Almost every sector has the ability to drive a country's GDP alone. For example, the professional and business services sector generated $3,330.4 billion in GDP, while the information industry sector contributed about $1,394.6 billion. This further highlights the diversification of the U.S. economy and the tremendous contribution of the service sector.
According to the U.S. Expenditure Statistics Act, GDP includes personal consumption, ** spending, investment, and net exports. Personal consumption is the engine of the U.S. economy, accounting for almost 70% of the total. In the fourth quarter of 2023, the U.S. economy grew at a rate of 33%, of which personal consumption expenditure contributed the most to the growth, up to 191 percentage points; Spending also played a positive role, contributing 056 percentage points, overall, personal consumption and ** spending together contributed 247 percentage points, becoming the main force driving economic growth.
However, there are many hidden mysteries in consumer spending. For example, in the consumption of private services in the United States, there is an item called virtual rent for self-owned housing, which does not refer to the rent earned from renting the house to others, but the fictitious rent of the American resident's own house calculated according to the market**. This alone has generated more than $2 trillion in virtual rents in just one year, equivalent to more than 7% of total GDP. Similar methods of counting expenditures, such as the sex industry, the drug trade, prison costs, and so on, have complex implications. This kind of data processing, similar to India's practice of counting cow dung into GDP, is full of mysteries.
Therefore, it will not be easy to catch up with US GDP. As long as the United States finds a way to increase spending, and adds another expenditure at will, trillions of dollars will come naturally. Therefore, it is more important to focus on household income than on aggregate GDP, which is a key indicator of the true gap between the two countries.
To sum up, the difference between the GDP of China and the United States is not only a simple comparison of numbers, but also reflected in many aspects such as economic structure and statistical methods. Economic development requires not only rapid growth, but also structural upgrading and readjustment. The economic competition between China and the United States is not only a competition of numbers, but also a contest of a development path and economic model. On the stage of globalization, how the two countries balance growth and structural optimization will have a direct impact on who will dominate the future economic landscape.