U.S. continues to dominate the global economy

A panoramic view of Manhattan, NY, Photo by King of Hearts via Wikimedia Commons

With nearly a quarter (24.3%) of the global GDP, the United States continue to dominate the world economy, attesting to the vibrancy of the American economy in an era of emerging new planks of economic growth.

The United States leads China, the next biggest economy(14.8% of GDP) by almost a double digit percentage, despite phenomenal advances Beijing has made during the last decade.

America is ahead of Japan, the third biggest economy, by a big 18% margin.

On Wednesday, howmuch.net website illustrated America’s dominance in the latest World Bank ranking of world economies with a Voronoi diagram.

The size of U.S. economy is equal to the combined GDPs of eight of the ten largest economies including Japan, Germany, the UK, France, India, Italy, Brazil and Canada.

Diagram courtesy howmuch.net 

In terms of continents or regions, Asia, led by such economies as China, Japan and South Korea, leads, accounting for over a third (33.84%) of global GDP.

North American contributes 27.95% of the world GDP while Europe, comes at the third place with over one fifth of global GDP (21.37%).

The collective GDP of the three regions totals 83.16% – indicating an understanding of the economic conditions that much of the populations in South America and Africa live in.

Analysts have long argued that the United States draws on a range of factors to maintain economic edge over other countries – like traditional natural wealth, large agricultural heartland, ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit, large industrial base and a system of stability.

But since 1990s the emergence of new Internet-assisted digital growth – fueled in no small pat by an inflow of highly skilled IT experts and experts in a wide array of fields – has given the United States a clear lead over its competitors.

For example, the world’s leading tech giants including Amazon, Facebook, the Google, Apple, Microsoft and Oracle are all U.S.-based.

In the latest scenario, the U.S. has done better than other countries in recovering from the 2007-08 financial crisis, and its stock exchanges have been hitting record highs since the election of President Donald Trump. Trump’s pledge to introduce tax reforms and boost infrastructure spending have increased business and investor confidence.

The White House focus on job generation and bringing back manufacturing to the U.S. is also popular, particularly in areas, where blue-collar workers lost jobs. These steps, when implemented, will stimulate economic activity in a range of sectors. But measures like travel restrictions on citizens of seven Middle Eastern and African countries – currently frozen under Court orders – have raised questions in terms of attracting top scientists and scholars from around the world.

America’s being a magnet for skilled and extraordinarily talented scientists, researchers and scholars makes America a unique marketplace of ideas and innovation.

According to McKinsey Global Institute’s latest study ‘Global Migration’s Impact and Opportunity’ the workforce of immigrants contributed around two trillion dollars to the U.S. GDP in the year 2015, while six out of seven American Nobel Prize winners were immigrants.

Yet, according to the World Bank, the global trade remains sluggish due to uncertainty around the world and developments like Brexit may weigh heavily on the world commerce.

The years ahead clearly demand innovation, infusion of new ideas from the best and the brightest from around the world, resolution to the ongoing conflicts for world peace, and growing international partners for America to maintain its economic superiority.