As for the popular belief that Asian producers are grabbing an ever-larger slice ofexports, the region's 31% shareofworldexports last year was not much higher than in 1995 (28%) and remains smaller than western Europe's.
An IMF working paper published in 2009 calculated that if China remained as dependent on exports as in recent years, then to sustain annual GDP growth of 8% its shareofworldexports would rise to about 17% by 2020.