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The world's economic centre of gravity
Recently, an analysis has been conducted on the world's economic centre of gravity (Economist 2012, Grether-Mathys 2010, Quah 2011). Our aim is to examine all the countries of the world's economic centre of gravity together, while examining the continents separately. In our study, the geometric centre of the area for all countries is weighted by nominal GDP obtained from the World Bank database for the years 1970-2014 (GDP data at current US $ market prices). Although this method can be problematic, particularly for wide-area countries, it can address the most important trends of spatial displacements. Here, we used the official map of Eurostat as a base map with ETRS89 projection.
During the study, analyses on all the countries were carried out, while the continents were analysed separately (America, Africa, Asia [including Australia and Oceania], and Europe). In our model, Russia was considered as a part of Europe. In the model, changes in the country's borders related to influencing factors including the interpretation of the illustration on the gravitational movement trends were examined, and not just the fluctuations from one year to another. We illustrated each year for reasons of visibility, in the global study; however, in the...