WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 (Xinhua) -- Cooperation between China and the United States is "now urgently necessary" to help support the world economy on which the COVID-19 pandemic is taking a heavy toll, a well-known American scholar has said.

"What is now urgently necessary is a joint effort by U.S. and China to partner in a project to help salvage the world economy," said Sarwar A. Kashmeri, a fellow of the Foreign Policy Association and an applied research fellow at the Peace and War Center, Norwich University, in a recent interview with Xinhua via email.

"Otherwise, it will be years (Moody's Analytics suggest mid-decade) before any sense of normalcy returns," the scholar said, noting that the two countries need to "dream big for their sake and the sake of the world."

"The pandemic has throttled the global economy without exception, and both Chinese and American economies have suffered serious injury from the pandemic," he said.

As COVID-19 continues spreading across the country, millions of Americans remain out of work and the number of people living in poverty is rapidly growing.

"Decoupling U.S.-China economic ties is impractical and will be ultimately damaging to U.S. standards of living," Kashmeri said. "How can any country decouple from the world's largest aviation, automobile, cellphone, and luxury-goods market?"

Taking the automobile industry in China for example, Kashmeri said it has already rebounded from the impact of COVID-19.

He took Daimler's Mercedes-Benz as an example, saying the German automobile brand sold a record 24 percent more vehicles in China in the third quarter of 2020 than in the same period of 2019.

The global economy will expand 4 percent in 2021, marking a return to growth after the 2020 recession, but substantial risks remain, according to Global Economic Prospects issued by the World Bank Group on Tuesday.