If California were a country
- 26
- Mar
Firstly, I was impressed by the graph below that I found on one of The Economists. I knew if California were a country, it will be the seventh biggest economy in the world, but I didn’t know that California´s GDP was similar to Italy… that Texas was similar to Russia, Florida to Netherlands, Michigan to Taiwan… and so on.
Understanding GDP as the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period and adding all the listed economies below we´ll get the total GDP for the US economy. Some may think that the graph was compering GDP per capita, however it was comparing nominal GDP. I found the same graph for Argentinean provinces but with GDP per capita, so if there is any Argentinean´s economist with time it´s pretty easy to find the other information.
The Economist has not only dug up the map above, but went it one better, doing the same for China’s provinces that was done for the US. Now you can clearly see the different countries that ¨were¨ listed for China than the ones listed for US.
Recently, a lot has been talked about US debt and how it has increased as a fraction of the GDP, we are getting close to the values of 1950. Debt should be measured as a percentage of GDP or the interest cost as a % of tax revenue.
The following website has a good chart (not the most up-to-date, but recent enough) showing the Debt/GDP of the U.S. compared to other major countries.
http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/10403-total-debt-to-gdp.html#axzz1HZ28Vkcq
If you look closely at this chart, you can see that the U.S. Debt/GDP is 296%. This is high, but much lower than Japan’s 471% and other countries such as UK, Spain, S. Korea. More importantly, if you look at the breakdown the Federal US Debt/GDP is only 67%. The other portion of the 296% is made up of businesses, banks, and households. When you compare the US´s 67% to China´s 32% you can see that the US has a problem. When you compare the U.S.’s 67% to Japan´s at 197% you can see that the U.S. has a problem, but nothing crucial.
If California were a country we´ll debt almost 10k per citizen.