Spotlight: Chapter 2 - Will the US retain its economic lead and who might challenge it?

The US’s economic leadership is partly related to its sheer size, but its population also works more than other countries and it fares better on productivity. While the US economy faces various threats, from fracturing to regulation, we doubt that it will see the sustained assault on its structures and culture that would be required to shift it to a permanently lower growth path. At the same time, it seems unlikely that either Europe or China – the two economic regions with enough scale and technological expertise to take over as the pre-eminent global economy – will up their game sufficiently to do so. If anything, with the AI revolution playing to the US’s strengths, the US is likely to widen its economic lead over the next couple of decades. But the shift to a more multipolar world might mean the US does not play quite as dominant a role as it has in recent decades.