Last year, China closed the GDP gap it has with the US, growing its economy by 2.3% to $14.7 trillion. The decreased the US's lead to just $6.2 trillion, as the US economy is estimated to have contracted 2.3% last year. The US GDP advantage was $7.1 trillion in 2019.

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That powerful trend led some economists earlier this year to predict China would overtake the US in 2028, several years sooner than earlier forecasts.

But maybe those latest forecasts were wrong.

A report from Capital Economics said last week that China's workforce is expected to shrink by more than 0.5% a year on average moving forward, as fewer young people replace a growing number of retirees. In the US by contrast, the workforce is expected to expand through the next 30 years, supported by higher fertility rates than in China and by immigration.

The Capital Economics report says it is possible that slowing productivity growth and a shrinking workforce would prevent China from ever overtaking the US, or that if it does, the US would regain the top spot again, helped by immigration that keeps refilling its supply of workers.

The median estimate in a Wall Street Journal survey of demographers and economists was for a 15% drop in 2020 births in China when the data becomes available. That means there likely will be fewer babies were born in the country in 2020 than in any year since 1961, when China suffered mass starvation.

The abolition of the China's one-child policy in 2016 simply hasn't "delivered" the expected baby boom.

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As a result of all this, China's economy is likely to be just the world's second biggest in 2050, still trailing the US.

The report said the pace of economic convergence between the countries is dependent on changes in productivity levels in both countries, as well as the rate of inflation for each and what happens with exchange rates. It said that if China doesn't overtake the US by the mid-2030s "it probably never will," in a rather stunning view.

The report also said that the "demographic headwinds" would continue to be slow China's economic growth

It said another likely outcome is that China makes it to the top spot, but then falls back again as this demographic drag increases.

Demographics is destiny, as the saying goes.

Of course, China doesn't quite see it this way.

When China convenes the most important event on its political calendar, the annual National People's Congress, on March 5, it will approve a long-term plan spanning 15 years. By the end of that road map, in 2035, China sees itself replacing the US as the world's largest economy.

China has said that automation would partly offset the effects of a decrease in workers. David Dollar, a Brookings Institution economist, voiced doubts about that assumption, telling the Wall Street Journal that "It's going to be difficult to coordinate the actual changes in automation with the declines of the labor force."

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