The United States will continue to command its economic influence over the Asia-Pacific region, although China has emerged as a new power, a British scholar said Friday.
"Is the U.S. economic star on the wane? To some degree, yes," Michael Cox, a professor at London School of Economics and Political Science, said at a conference hosted by Hong Kong's Lingnan University.
"But (others) still have a very long way to go to catch up with a country whose gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009 was still light years ahead of the rest."
The U.S. GDP was US$14 trillion in 2009, compared to China's $8.8 trillion.
While the global financial crisis sparked by the collapse of U.S. banking giant Lehman Brothers in 2008 has raised worldwide doubts about the Western economic model, the U.S. has the edge over China, the scholar said.
Quoting from a book written by Carla Norloff, a University of Toronto professor, Cox said the United States has the global advantage because of the size of its market, the wealth of its people and its control over world finance.
"The very fact that the U.S. can run such huge deficits with its trading partners and such vast budget deficits, too, is less a sign of decline and more an indication of strength," he said.
"After all, if it can get foreigners, including willing Asians, to buy its debt, while printing dollars at will to pay its outstanding bills, this only shows what structural power it still has."
Cox stressed the U.S. dollar is still and will be for a while the only currency that has international pulling power.
"If the U.S. were in so much trouble ... why do U.S. Treasury bills show little sign of losing their allure?" he said.
China's economic size has been rapidly growing, replacing Japan as the world's second largest economy earlier this year.
According to a Goldman Sachs report, the U.S. economy will likely be at least 10 percent smaller than China's by 2050.