L’essor et le déclin de l’Occident: une perspective géographique (The Rise and Fall of the West: a Geographical Perspective)

This paper proposes a new representation of the worldwide distribution of human population and economic activity over two millennia. Combining the Maddison and the G-Econ databases, it tracks the evolution of the world’s demographic and economic centers of gravity during the 1-2010 period. The distributional and temporal patterns that emerge are clear and contrasted, with a stable East-Asian predominance during the first eighteen centuries, followed by a boomerang-like westward shift during the last two centuries. New turning points are identified, suggesting that the reversal of the Western shift occurred as early as the 1920s in demographic terms and in the 1950s in economic ones. JEL classification: N10, O10 and R10