big world

Someone asked me why I was so interested in Egypt.  There are two reasons (1) they are attempting to prevent a run on a currency by engineering a controlled devaluation.  That is a difficult task and it is still to be seen if they can do it.  Latest update here  (2) they are the big player in the Mid East and what happens there could have significant ripples.

Sometimes we forget how big a world it is.   Below is a graph of the worlds 20 most populous countries
 

Obviously China and India stand out.  But how often do you read news about Indonesia or Pakistan or Bangladesh or the Philippines or Vietnam or Ethiopia.  In  terms of population those are big countries - much bigger than say the UK or France.  These 20 countries make up 70% of the world's population.

Now plot the nominal GDPs of those same 20 countries.

The US still leads the world in nominal GDP (world GDP rank in parentheses).  China (2), Japan (3), Germany (4), Brazil (7), Russia (8), India (10), Mexico (14), Indonesia (16), Turkey (17) all appear on the 20 most populace chart above and also rank within the world's top 20 countries in GDP.  Missing from the above chart are the following countries who rank in the world's top 20 in terms of GDP but not in terms of population:  France (6), UK (7), Italy (10), Canada (12), Australia (13), Spain (14), South Korea (15), the Netherlands (18), Saudi Arabia (19), Switzerland (20).

Finally plot the per capita GDPs of those same 20 most populace countries

The results are pretty stark.  The US, Japan, and Germany stand out as the wealthy countries.  There is a second group Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Turkey whose per capita GDPs all sit around 10,000 USD. One more tier down are China, Iran, and Thailand.  Then there are the other ten countries all with per capita GDPs below 4,000 USD.   India with a population over three times that of the US has a per capita income of approximately 5% of the US.  Pakistan plus Bangladesh has a population equal to the US and yet their combined GDP barely register.

Just something to think about.