Tuesday, January 01, 2008

World Economy

The World Bank says China and India are not what they are pumped up to be. The Bank has "downsized" the economies of the two Asian giants by nearly 40% under new metrics, which it says are more reliable and accurate than previous estimates.

According to the new data, India's GDP in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms was $2.34 trillion in 2005 and in nominal dollar terms was $779 billion. Prior to the revision, India's GDP in PPP terms was $3.8 trillion in 2005, which would have made it the third largest economy after China and ahead of Germany, tied with Japan. Using the new figure, it's fifth.

The revised estimates also downsized China's economy, although it remained the second largest economy behind the US. China's economy under the new metrics was $5.33 trillion in 2005 in PPP terms against the $8.8 trillion estimated earlier.

The top 10 economies in the world, totalling 64% of the global $55 trillion GDP(PPP):
1 United States $12.38T (22.5%)
2 People's Republic of China $5.33T (9.7%)
3 Japan $3.87T (7.0%)
4 Germany $2.51T (4.6%)
5 India $2.34T (4.3%)
6 United Kingdom $1.90T (3.5%)
7 France $1.86T (3.4%)
8 Russia $1.70T (3.1%)
9 Italy $1.63T (3.0%)
10 Brazil $1.59T (2.9%)

Source: World Bank

1 comment:

ALD said...

Replacing World Bank data with (in my opinion, less reliable) IMF data results in a much larger global economy ($72 trillion) and a somewhat different ranking of the top ten economies.