Government Type and Economic Prosperity Visualized
June 2010
Government Type and Economic Prosperity Visualized
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DISCUSS


Reader Comments (11)

Posted by: Goatface at 07/13/2010 08:47:02 PM

I'd be more interested in these figures presented per-capita, since the large population size of China's has nothing to do with its government style. It would also make apparent how much poorer India is than China, given their roughly similar population sizes.

Posted by: Carter Brown at 07/13/2010 08:52:04 PM

Nice graphics, but what does it mean? I mean, what relevance does GDP have towards a country's well being. This over-cited measure is only really useful for measuring economic growth. It doesn't relate to the well being of the people who live there. Should have been GDP per Capita or GDP Growth in my opinion. GDP by itself is completely assinine. Nice graphics though..

Posted by: Gareth at 07/13/2010 08:53:57 PM

This means nothing. GDP alone is meaningless here; GDP per capita would be far more useful.

Posted by: Chris at 07/13/2010 09:00:44 PM

This is a meaningless chart. You should be showing GDP per capita.

Posted by: Jared at 07/13/2010 09:01:35 PM

This is very misleading. GDP is gross domestic product and is calculated (overly simplistically, I know) by the total amount of product produced and traded or the total amount of product consumed and traded (both equations give you the same result). Because some countries (China and India for example) have so many people, they consume much more overall and their GDP goes up. In order to show a true correlation between form of government and "economic prosperity, this graph hould be normalized by GDP per capita, Again the above information is very misleading. I'm from the US and am proud of the large GDP per capita (but I don't think US is #1. I think Switzerland is from memory). Switzerland is a democracy (richest form of government around).

Posted by: lance at 07/13/2010 09:11:56 PM

Per capita or bust.

Posted by: MTierce at 07/13/2010 09:29:46 PM

I think this is a bit misleading. Consider per-capita GDP at Purchasing Power Parity, which attempts to normalize for population size and currency value. wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita The highest China appears on those lists is 84. BTW restricting links in comments is, quite frankly, annoying.

Posted by: Duo at 07/13/2010 09:43:35 PM

GDP per capita would be a more useful measure of economic prosperity.

Posted by: A. Nonymous at 07/13/2010 09:44:19 PM

Let's see that same infographic using per-capita GDP.

Posted by: Hasan at 07/13/2010 10:08:26 PM

GDP per capita would make a lot more sense

Posted by: Paul at 07/13/2010 10:19:24 PM

Two phrases: -"per capita" -"correlation does not imply causation" Redo this with those two phrases in mind, and maybe this will *start* to approach validity.