The global economy's shifting centre of gravity

Define the global economy's centre of gravity to be the average location of economic activity across geographies on Earth. If you go grab incomes and geographical location data across nearly 700 identifiable places on the planet (World Development Indicators Online, Asian Development Bank, Google Earth, Brinkhoff; Grether and Mathys) you will see that in 1980 the global economy’s centre of gravity was mid-Atlantic. You will also see that by 2008, from the continuing rise of China and the rest of East Asia, that centre of gravity has drifted to a location east of Helsinki and Bucharest. Extrapolating growth in almost 700 locations across Earth, gives you the world’s economic centre of gravity shifting by 2050 to literally between India and China. Observed from Earth’s surface, that economic centre of gravity will move from its 1980 location 9300 km or 1.5 times the radius of the planet.

A graphic illustration of this is given in the Figure. The dots in black are 1980-2007; those dots reduced and in red are for 2010-2049 in an extrapolation. The center of gravity calculations are performed in 3-dimensional space and then projected onto the normal cylinder tangent to the planet at the equator.

My paper with the same name as this post describes more fully the ideas here.

(Thanks to Google Earth for help with this. To transform a 3-dimensional sphere into an unfolded 2-dimensional flat plane, the mapping is not a Hilbert space projection. For one, the tangent normal cylinder is only locally linear; it is therefore not a linear space. I calculated the dynamics using R; I generated the sequence of world maps in python; and I then used gimp and ImageMagick batch-processing to produce the final animation.)