Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Comparative economics

Perhaps you've seen this.

It's a map of the US that shows how the GDP of countries compare with the "GDPs" of states. (Click on the image to see it full size.) So we see that Norway's 4.5 million people produce as much as the 5 million people of Minnesota. And the 12.5 million people of Illinois produce about as much as the 100 million people who live in Mexico. If you or your students do the math, you can see not only the productivity per capita, but a rough indication of income per capita.

Here are updated statistics for the AP6:

Mexico has the equivalent GDP ($1.2 trillion) of Texas
Iran has the GDP ($600 billion) equivalent of Illinois
the UK's GDP ($1.9 trillion) and Russia's GDP ($1.8 trillion) are about the same as that of California
China produces $10.2 trillion of goods and services -- about the same as the 18 most-productive states in the USA (CA, TX, NY, FL, IL, PA, OH, NJ, NC, GA, VA, MI, MA, WA, MD, MN, AZ, and IN)
Nigeria's GDP ($191 billion) is about the same as Louisiana's

If you or your students look up the populations of those equivalents, you (or they) can figure out the per capita GDPs, and that's interesting in other ways.

There's also an interesting "GDP Density Map" at one of my favorite web sites, Visualizing Economics.

And, if you go to Econbrowser, the site where Visualizing Economics found the GDP Density Map, you'll find that map paired with a night time satellite picture of the earth from space.