As the grim economic news piles up ever higher, so the headlines grow ever more lurid. The latest, inspired by a gloom-laden assessment of prospects from the Ernst & Young Item Club, suggests that Britain faces an “economic horror movie”.

The trouble is that the analogy is scarcely excessive. If the economy's present woes really are spooling out like a horror flick, it is not one of those vaguely laughable schlock teen slasher productions, but a real certificate 18 spine-tingler that threatens us with psychological trauma. Even worse, we may be in only the early reels of an epic that will be chilling us all through this year and next.

Yet, ultimately, as with all horror movies, the terror will end and the lights will surely come back up. The question that should keep us on the edge of our seats is what fate will await Britain when the final reel of this downturn has played out. Where will we be left?

Although there may be a protracted saga of economic torment to endure in the meantime, one that will inevitably have its victims, the good news is that the eventual ending should actually herald a brighter future.

If Britain is to succumb to recession, we need to remember that such periods are a virtually inescapable feature of even the most successful capitalist economies, even a necessary one to purge the system of past excesses, inefficient practices and the weakest links among businesses.

We also need to remind ourselves that we emerged from the distress of past recessionary episodes to a brighter future in which Britons have never been more prosperous. We remain fortunate to live in an economy that, for all its notable and increasingly obvious shortcomings, is dynamic, flexible and possessed of immense potential.

That huge potential is spelt out in a fascinating new analysis by Goldman Sachs of how the league of leading world economies might look by the end of the next decade, and by the middle of the century.

Goldman's study, by Dominic Wilson and Raluca Dragusanu, builds on its past, prescient projections foreshadowing the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China, which it famously dubbed the “Bric” economies. As before, it calculates that by 2020, China will have surged past Japan to become the world's No2 economy, ranked by GDP, and will be close on the heels of the United States. By then, India will have overtaken France and will be close to overhauling Britain in terms of the absolute size of its economy.

However, although Britain may have been surpassed in sheer economic scale by these giant new players, it too should have continued to grow and prosper over the next decade. Crucially, even if the UK is only the sixth-largest economy by 2020, its relatively modest population will share that increased wealth among a smaller number.

The upshot, Goldman concludes, is that, measured by GDP per head, it is little Britain that by then could well be the richest nation on Earth, eclipsing even America.

Propelled up the global rich list of countries by its oil and gas, Russia's economy may by then be bigger than Italy's and its citizens may be enjoying the living standards made possible by GDP per person of more than $20,000 (£10,000).

Well over a billion Chinese may have seen their national GDP per head reach almost $10,000. Yet by then the figure for the UK may already be over $55,000 (£27,000) for every Briton. Although Goldman reckons that by 2050 the US may be back on top in the rankings of GDP per head, the UK would still be in second place.

There are plenty of caveats, of course, and many things that could go wrong. Yet the prize that we might just grasp as a country is clear. Although we are fretting at present over a return to the dog days of the 1970s, when Britain was the “sick man of Europe”, the Seventies spirit that we could recapture could instead be that of the 1870s - a golden era of Victorian prosperity and national self-confidence.

These “great expectations” seem to raise two big questions. First, what can be done to ensure that this huge opportunity is grasped? Secondly, just how happy will we be as a nation if it is?

For all its present woes, over the past ten years the UK economy has indeed thrived. Yet, as Mervyn King, the Bank of England's Governor, has emphasised in his perceptive analysis of that “nice decade”, we had it pretty easy. Britain benefited from the fair wind of global low inflation and low interest rates, fostered by the decisive entry of China into the world economy and a global savings glut that made capital cheap and abundant. All of that allowed Gordon Brown to preside over good times that were as much in spite of his efforts as because of them.

In the more volatile and turbulent era on which we have embarked, ensuring that Britain seizes its opportunities will in large part mean ditching Mr Brown's mistaken conviction that the necessary entrepreneurialism, innovation and productivity to drive prosperity can be unleashed by the dead hand of the state pulling levers in Whitehall. Ten years of the Prime Minister's quest for the holy grail of higher productivity have proved largely fruitless. The spirit of enterprise that Mr Brown has claimed to want to foster has meanwhile been stifled by a choking combination of ever-rising business taxes and red tape. All of that must be thrown into reverse.

None of this means that unleashing the free market offers a simple prescription to allow Britain to fulfil the economic promise mapped out by Goldman. The present global financial turmoil created by parts of Wall Street and the City is a stark reminder that markets alone are not enough.

Nor will ensuring that Britain secures its clear potential for prosperity guarantee national happiness. Wealth may help, but alone is clearly neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure the security and contentment that we all crave. That is where the even greater challenge of political leadership will lie in the years to come. At least, though, we can take comfort amid the present “horrors” that a happy ending remains the most likely conclusion.

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