Logistic growth of the global economy and competitiveness of nations

In the first part of the paper we are dealing with the possibility of predicting long-term development on the basis of logistic/exponential curves. We have selected three characteristics of global development, namely the change of population size in the world, the volume of world output (measured by the value of global GDP) and global welfare (GDP per capita). The important feature of the proposed approach is that we propose to examine the impact of different identification criterion on the obtained predictions. It turns out that the assumed criterion of parameters' identification could essentially influence the obtained predictions.In the second part of the paper, the extension of the logistic curve into the substitution–diffusion model is proposed. This allows us to evaluate the future share of national/regional economies in the global GDP and to estimate the competitiveness of these economies. It turns out that the competitiveness of nations/regions is far from being constant. A proposal of building the competitiveness ranking of nations/regions is presented. In the final section a possible scenario of development of the five countries/regions (namely the USA, the E12, Japan, China, India) is presented.

► We predict global growth (population, GDP) by logistic and exponential curves
► Predictions significantly depend on applied identification criterions
► Shares of different countries/regions is predicted by evolutionary substitution model
► Chinese economy will experience slowdown or even decline
► We evaluate the competitiveness of countries/regions.