US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs
 

Didn't want to hijack SU's trolling on Utah and poverty, so I'm throwing this into another thread...

cool map:

http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.c...92a0d28_o1.jpg


"Although the economies of countries like China and India are growing at an incredible rate, the US remains the nation with the highest GDP in the world – and by far: US GDP is projected to be $13,22 trillion (or $13.220 billion) in 2007, according to this source. That’s almost as much as the economies of the next four (Japan, Germany, China, UK) combined.

The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.

Pakistan, for example, has a GDP that’s slightly higher than Israel’s – but Pakistan has a population of about 170 million, while Israel is only 7 million people strong. The US states those economies are compared with (Arkansas and Oregon, respectively) are much closer to each other in population: 2,7 million and 3,4 million.

And yet, wile a per capita GDP might give a good indication of the average wealth of citizens, a ranking of the economies on this map does serve two interesting purposes: it shows the size of US states’ economies relative to each other (California is the biggest, Wyoming the smallest), and it links those sizes with foreign economies (which are therefore also ranked: Mexico’s and Russia’s economies are about equal size, Ireland’s is twice as big as New Zealand’s)."

This is really cool, thanks for posting this.

I think I just had one of those patriotic moments. Or should we try to be more like Sweden? ;)

It surprises me that Idaho has a larger economy than Utah. Is the difference attributable to Simplot, Albertson's and Boise Cascade?

In addition to those companies, Idaho has a pretty strong tech sector.

That's true. I forgot about Micron.

HP has a large presence there too.

How much does the production of taters factor into Idaho's economy?

I bet it's big. There's alot of rich spud farmers.

Very cool. Thanks.

Kudos to the Netherlands, who can match Pennsylvania's GDP with only 30% more people.