HONG KONG, Nov 27: China is poised to become the engine of the world economy this century but Japan’s failure to tackle its bad debt problem could scuttle any early return to significant global growth, a leading economist said on Wednesday.

Kenneth Courtis, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia, said China was poised to become the global economic powerhouse of the 21st century, rivaling the impact the United States had during the last 100 years.

One of the strongest positives for the world economy is what is going on in China. I believe that we are in a process which doesn’t happen every 50 years, it is only once every three or four hundred years when something this big, this all embracing, happens.

I think its pretty clear that unless something pretty dramatic and unexpected happens in the next couple of decades, the dominant economic fact of this century will be the rise of China, Courtis told the Hong Kong Business Summit.

Premier Zhu Rongji said earlier this month China hopes to quadruple the size of its economy over the next 20 years. China grew by an average annual rate of 7.6 per cent between 1998 and 2001.—AFP