The writer is chair of Rockefeller International

A hot spurt for global growth is generating breathless headlines. India is on pace to be “the world’s fastest growing large economy” and France is posting its “strongest growth in 52 years”. President Joe Biden cites the latest quarterly growth data as evidence that the US economy is growing “faster than China’s” for the first time in two decades and is “finally building an American economy for the 21st century”. 

Alas, 2021 looked so good only because so many economies contracted sharply the year before. This bounceback blip says nothing about the 21st century. The question is how fast economies can grow after the pandemic, once base effects fade and stimulus recedes. Trends in demographics and productivity suggest the global economy is likely to grow even more slowly in the 2020s than it did last decade.