SHANGHAI, November 5. /TASS/. Two centuries of European and US dominance in the global economy have come to an end as growth drivers return to Asia, according to Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

"We have a fundamental rebalancing of the world economy underway, which is the deepest and most profound rebalancing that is taking place in our time. And that is a rebalancing, if you will, between the West and Asia," Sachs said at the Hongqiao International Economic Forum during the 9th China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai. "Essentially, we're living through a period in which the Western dominance of global politics and the Western dominance of the world economy has come to an end after around 200 years of Western dominance."

He noted that from the early 19th century to the late 20th century, Europe and the United States were the world's leading powers. For many people, Western dominance seemed to be a natural and unchanging state of affairs, Sachs said.

"Of course, knowing long-term history would have completely disabused them of that, because for almost all of the history that we know, and certainly for the last 2,000 years, the center of gravity of the world economy and world population was always in Asia. And India and China together regularly constituted between 40 and 50 percent of the world population and between 40 and 50 percent of world output," the professor noted.

According to him, Asia's share of global output declined from 60% in 1820 to 20% by 1950. However, with the ongoing rebalancing of forces, the East is now reclaiming its central place in the global economy, Sachs concluded.