Saturday, August 7, 2010

How big is the world's economy?

I admit I stole this from Fortune magazine who in admit they stole if from a famous article published in Prospect magazine. It's the idea of thinking of the world economy as a multiple of one state's economy, and thereby reducing the the unmanageable to the imaginable. It's a version of see foreign exchange rates in terms of the cost of a Macdonald's burger. Nico Colchester the author of the original article measured in Italys. The economy was then worth about a trillion or 26 Italy's. Fortune, being an American magazine has chosen Californias. The world economy is worth 32 Californias. (California $1.8b and World - $58 trillion; 58 times what it was in 1995 by the way.) And here's a table of a breakdown of of the world's economies:
US economy - 8 Californias
European Union (and added to it the holdouts in Europe, Switzerland and Norway), plus Canada, Oz and NZ: 10.5 Californias
"Prosperous Asia" (a neat term) - 3.5 Californias
that's Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore
China - 3.3 Californias
The rest - 6.7
that's most of SE Asia, BRICs, all of Latin America and the whole of the Islamic world including all the oil.

Fortunes does say the figures are very rough.

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