(Yicai) Sep. 1 -- China has been the world's largest economic driver in the past decade, with a significant impact, Margit Molnar, the Head of the China Desk at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), told Yicai in an exclusive interview on Friday.

Molnar was among 10 European and American think tank representatives invited to China for in-depth dialogues with Chinese government, business, and strategic academic representatives at the Mingde Strategic Dialogue exchange event in late August 2024.

"China has driven global economic growth. In the past decade, China's contribution to world economic growth was about 27% to 29%. This figure is higher during economic downturns, reaching 31% during the pandemic," she said.

Regarding China's impact on world economic development, Molnar noted that China's WTO accession has provided many opportunities. For the past two to three decades, China was perhaps the world's biggest opportunity for processing and assembling imported intermediate products for export to third countries. However, this period has ended as China has developed to a higher level and can now produce these intermediate products itself.

She stated that innovative technological achievements and industrial upgrades have enabled China to produce more high-end products, reducing dependence on imported intermediate goods and even supplying them to other countries as production inputs. She expects this trend to continue.

New Challenges in Global Trade

Molnar pointed out that world economic growth and trade growth have diverged in recent years. While world economic growth is slowly recovering, world trade growth rates have been declining year by year.

The OECD Economic Outlook 2024, released in the first half of the year, stated that after robust growth of 5.3% in 2022, world trade volume growth slowed significantly to 1% in 2023.

She suggested that trade restrictions could be one of the reasons for this trend.

"We need to reduce trade restrictions, both tariff and non-tariff barriers. All countries in the world must understand that international trade benefits everyone," she said.

In the report, the OECD forecasts that global trade in goods and services will grow by 2.3% this year and 3.3% in 2025. By the end of 2025, global trade openness, defined as the ratio of total imports and exports of all economies to global GDP, is expected to be 0.3 percentage points higher than in the fourth quarter of 2023, while the ratio of global trade growth to global GDP growth will approach pre-2019 levels.