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Perhaps, we shouldn't be too surprised by news that China is on the brink of breaking yet another world record. It's already the world's most populous country. It has some of the world's largest cities. And then this week, Alibaba Group, China's equivalent of the online retailer Amazon, announced it would sell its shares on the New York stock market, in what is said to be the biggest ever initial public offering in American history. But why do these superlatives matter? Why in fact should we even care about the size of a country's economy? George Magnus is an author and the former chief economist at the investment bank UBS. He's also an experienced China watcher.

Well the reason that I suppose size matters is because large economies can throw their weight around the world obviously much more readily and actually they're expected to do so than smaller economies. Luxembourg, for example, Switzerland have, I mean they're extremely wealthy countries, they have the highest income per capita. For example, in the world, as to small oil producing countries like Qatar for example, their weight in the world system geopolitically speaking isn't that big, whereas larger, more populous countries that are also quite rich clearly have much more to say and they're expected to play a bigger responsible role in terms of global leadership.