A child takes a self-portrait near skyscrapers in Shanghai's Lujiazui area. Provided to China Daily

China's economy will become twice as big as that of the United States and larger than both the US and the EU combined within just 17 years, according to one of China's leading economists.

Hu Angang, dean of the Institute for Contemporary China Studies, one of China's leading think tanks, makes the prediction in his new book, China 2030.

The book, already out in Chinese and to be published in English next month, is likely to attract major interest around the world.

His forecast - which also sees China becoming the biggest economy by 2020 - is the boldest and most optimistic prediction yet about China's economic future.

It also comes at a time when there are concerns about China's short-term prospects with GDP growth slower than expected in the first quarter at 7.7 percent, down from 7.9 percent in the final quarter of last year.

China still has a hurdle to cross just to overtake the US, with China's $8.23 trillion nominal GDP being just over half (52 percent) of the US' $15.68 trillion in 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund.

However, the likelihood of matching the US sooner rather than later has certainly increased since Goldman Sachs made its forecast in 2006 that China will be the biggest economy by 2025.

That too was also considered optimistic at the time but the financial crisis has hit the US hard and might now even be considered a conservative estimate.

Since then, China has emerged in pole position when it overtook Japan to become the world's second-largest economy in February 2011.

Hu, who is a professor of economics at China's elite Tsinghua University and the author of no fewer than 60 books, is raising the stakes with his own prediction, going further than any forecast either in China or overseas.

He believes China will be driven forward by what he terms five engines: accelerating industrialization, its major role in a new globalized world, its dominance in information technology, the rapid modernization of its infrastructure in areas such as electricity supply and high-speed railways, and the growing internationalization of its own economy.

He points out that China's workforce of 780 million is five times larger than the US' 153 million and that it now devotes 3 million person-years to research and development, twice the deployment of the US, both adding to its growth momentum.