Remember how China's economy was supposed to surpass the U.S.'s sometime in the next decade or so? Turns out it may have already happened. The World Bank's International Comparison Program takes account of international prices to give a more accurate measure of a nation's real output. The statisticians have just completed the exercise for 2011, and they found that China's economy was 87 percent as large as the U.S.'s-not 47 percent, as output converted at market exchange rates would have you believe. Since 2011, China has grown much faster than the U.S. According to the World Bank's numbers, China's economy will be the world's biggest before 2014 is out, if it isn't already.
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