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You need to adjust for the currency. Rupee is artificially lowered to boost exports. Italy has 58M people. India has 1.25B people. This is approximately 25 time
by snambi 11y ago
You need to adjust for the currency. Rupee is artificially lowered to boost exports. Italy has 58M people. India has 1.25B people. This is approximately 25 times. So, India needs at-least 25x food, cloths, housing etc. If you take actual quantity and calculate using dollar terms, it would result in india being much bigger economy than Italy.
- arethuza 11y agoBut doesn't that imply that comparing national GDPs is silly then - because presumably you could make that kind of argument about any country?
- akiselev 11y agoIndia is richer than Italy because it has 25 times more people/food? That's absolute nonsense. If you take actual quantity and calculate using dollar terms, this is what you get: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
- arethuza 11y agoThat's interesting - so if you ignore the EU as not really being a country the #1 is China.
- akiselev 11y agoYes, in aggregate the PPP GDP of China is #1, just slightly ahead of the United States, both of which are just below the European Union (which, to be fair, is like the US but with each state having more sovereignty in the federal system). The picture is complicated by the relative populations though. Per capita, the EU is $25k, China is $13k, US is $54k, Germany is $46k, and India is only $6k. Unfortunately, the PPP calculation is very complicated and controversial so I don't really know how valid or useful these numbers are. Unless we're going for a trivial definition, it also doesn't say much about availability of luxuries, infrastructure, stability of government/economy, etc. so it's not a 1:1 mapping of wealth.