EDIT: Ireland very cleverly reduced corporate income taxes to lure in many multinational corporations. Kudos to them. I doubt Canada can replicate it. We have resources and resources are hard to move around. I hope we can get our economy to produce more added value products but so far that hasn't worked out.
I know it’s hard but once again the Canadians, the Australians and the New Zealanders are gonna have to grow up and take their futures into their hands. It’s time to step up the United States is not gonna help you with that. It is time to become a grown-up in the wider world.
A American, who can see the writing on the wall leading into the end of the century.
I did not know that. It's not a metric I follow. I think it's unfair of you to say "and you know it". It's a good data point and I'm going to not step in and debate it .. because you know it ;) just kidding. I'm spending too much time getting emotionally attached to these stupid online threads.
Please avoid using PPP. The fact that some country has cheap potato or consumer electricity rates doesn't mean a worker can buy more iphones or macbooks with their salary. Macbooks and iphones actually cost more than in the West in our country which is "4th world economy" in your rating.
Gross Domestic Product is measuring *domestic* output, so adjusting for *domestic* pricing makes sense.
Measuring it in a foreign currency doesn’t without accounting for that is just answering “how many iphones can country X afford” (handwaving away the nuances of what GDP measures with “afford”) which might be a statistic you care about but probably isn’t (and isn’t for the point that was being made).
> The fact that some country has cheap potato or consumer electricity rates doesn't mean a worker can buy more iphones or macbooks with their salary.
Same can be said about paying 100x more on prescription drugs and counting that as GDP. Also having the most expensive french fries doesn't make it a bigger economy just because iphones are cheaper.
>>Same can be said about paying 100x more on prescription drugs and counting that as GDP.
This is actually valuable for drug exporters (and yet another reason Trump can bully countries around - US market is the most lucrative market there is).
Yeah but in some sense you can't use any number because we're comparing the incomparable. "Larger economy" isn't a well defined term. And we can't measure it based on nominal GDP because that involves exchange rates and they depend on factors other than economic size.
It could be said that the US was the largest economy when it was 10x the next by most measures, because it was clearly just better than the alternatives. Not so much now (their model still turns out the best per-capita numbers for a large country though).
The more important measure is really who has the economy best configured to win a war. I expect China to be able to out-produce the US at mass cheap components, especially for drones, so for military purposes I'd expect China to have the long term edge in the sort of moderate intensity conflict we're seeing around the globe. Hard to be confident though, and the exact nature of such a war is unclear because diplomacy would be a huge factor.
PPP metric might be somewhat useful to estimate purchasing power of given country citizens in their everyday life but it is useless when talking about economy size. In the context of this thread for example the reason US has so bargaining power is that access to its market is very lucrative.
India might be at 18.9 and US 32.4 in PPP but access to US market is worth around 10x more - that's the nominal GDP difference in action.
Is it still the largest economy? By many numbers, it is not.
The United Kingdom used to be in a similar position and Ireland was like Canada. Nowadays, Ireland does not need to cave in to its neighbor's demands.