China is on track to become the world’s biggest exporter and fourth largest economy by 2010, a phenomenon that the OECD attributes in its first full economic survey of the country to Beijing’s willingness to adopt difficult market reforms at the expense of the state sector.

The OECD, the Paris-based organisation which represents 30 mainly wealthy nations, said China’s economic transformation had left it well placed to maintain its average 9.5 per cent growth rate of the last two decades for “some time.”