Certain industries create more value and have a greater impact than others. We call these outperformers arenas of competition. They are defined by two characteristics: high growth and high dynamism. Due to their growth, they capture an oversized share of the economy’s overall expansion; in terms of dynamism, market share within them changes hands to an oversized degree.

This report from the McKinsey Global Institute identifies 18 future arenas that could reshape the global economy between now and 2040. To do so, we first analyze a data set of the world’s 3,000 largest companies from 2005 to 2020 and pinpoint 12 arenas of today, including biopharmaceuticals, cloud services, e-commerce, and electric vehicles (Exhibit 1). Arenas of today refers to the arenas that formed over the past two decades. We used 2005 to 2020 as our analytical interval to delineate a clean decade boundary and ensure consistent, well-established data.

Read more and download the complete report at McKinsey & Company.