Meet Kyu Hwang,
The Researcher Behind the Long View of the Global Economy
Kyu Hwang works outside any single institution. His research focuses on long term global economic structures. He studies the forces that determine how national economies rise, plateau, and converge over decades, along with the demographic and institutional conditions that make sustained growth either possible or difficult. He wrote this book because no comparable treatment of long run global economic structure, covering all 197 sovereign nations and extending projections to 2100, existed. That absence, more than any other motivation, made the work necessary.
Building a Dataset That Covers the Entire World
For this book, he spent years assembling and cross-verifying a dataset spanning all 197 sovereign nations. The research draws on World Bank national accounts, UN World Population Prospects, the Penn World Table, and historical GDP series that extend back to the early industrial era. The objective was not to predict the future with false precision. It was intended to identify which structural patterns, left unmodified, would produce particular outcomes by the end of the century.
A Project Born from a Turning Point in Global History
The work was shaped by a distinct moment in global history. The collapse of the free-trade paradigm under Trump’s tariff policies, the deepening rivalry between the United States and China, the COVID-19 pandemic reshaping global supply chains, and the rapid advance of artificial general intelligence all unfolded simultaneously. They were converging forces that would determine which economies had the structural capacity to adapt and which did not.
Giving Equal Attention to All 197 Nations
Hwang is especially attentive to the economies that receive the least analytical coverage in mainstream commentary. Smaller African nations, landlocked Central Asian republics, and Pacific island states are examined individually rather than folded into regional categories. Each of the 197 countries is treated as its own case. The result is a dataset and a book with a scope not previously attempted in a single volume.
The Central Finding
His central conclusion is direct. By 2100, Western civilisation will account for 23.7 per cent of world GDP and 10.6 per cent of world population. This is not presented as ideology. It is the output of demographic weight combined with even modest long-run productivity gains, compounded over eight decades. The arithmetic is transparent and open to verification.