Why Western countries are no longer chasing economic growth

For Western countries, 2022 turned out to be quite prosperous. The US economy continues to develop, while in authoritarian China, the growth rate is the weakest since the reign of Mao Zedong (he served as the first chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China from 1943 to 1976. -). It seems that the wave of populism that began to spread in rich countries in 2016 with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2017 has reached its peak.

While the world's attention is focused on other issues, advanced democracies face a deep, slow-growing problem: weak economic growth. In the year leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic , advanced economies' GDP increased by less than 2%. The robust performance suggests that productivity in the rich world (the main source of rising living standards) is stagnant at best, but may be declining. Official forecasts suggest that by 2027, average per capita GDP growth in a rich country will be less than 1.5% per year. In some states, such as Canada and Switzerland, the numbers will be close to zero.