Chart of The Week - Increasing Significance of Chinese Growth

I haven’t posted a chart of the week for some months. It has to be very telling; it has to be important.

This graphic qualifies on both counts:

Monthly change since January in real retail sales (in January 2007, US$ bn)

Source: Goldman Sachs Global ECS Research


What does it show? Over the period of the recent downturn in global economies, the loss of US real retail sales through recession was about the same in absolute Dollars as the gain in retail sales in absolute Dollars in China.



If ever there was a way of capturing the increased global significance of Chinese economic growth this is it. Chinese growth is so large that it rivals in absolute dollars the significance of the United States in changes in marginal contributions to real global growth, at least as far as the consumer is concerned.


Of course we already had on board that China’s growth in commodity consumption can overwhelm the significance of that of the rest of the world. But it is not just through industrialisation that China is making it’s impact.