Interesting Economic Data

[MarkBarbieri]

There's nothing like a cold and windy day to stay inside and play with economic data. I was over at the IMF website and found that they have a really cool tool that allows you to download data. I picked several interesting countries and grabbed a variety of economic statistics on them. Once I had the data, I put it into Excel and played with pivot tables.

Here are some fun facts:

Between 2000 and 2007, here is how total employment increased in some countries:


Canada 14%
France 6%
Germany 2%
Ireland 25%
Italy 10%
Japan -1%
United Kingdom 6%
United States 7%


Here is the percentage of the people in a variety of countries that are employed:


Italy 39%
France 42%
Taiwan 45%
Sweden 47%
United Kingdom 48%
Germany 48%
Korea 48%
United States 48%
Ireland 49%
Australia 50%
Japan 50%
Canada 51%
Switzerland 58%


Why do so few people in Italy and France work? Why do so many in Switzerland work?

Here is the population growth from 2000 to 2007 for selected countries:


Russia -3%
Germany 0%
Japan 1%
Switzerland 2%
Taiwan 3%
Korea 3%
Italy 3%
Sweden 3%
United Kingdom 3%
China 4%
France 5%
United States 7%
Canada 7%
Mexico 7%
Australia 10%
Brazil 11%
India 12%
Ireland 14%
Saudi Arabia 19%


Here is the net national debt as a percentage of GDP for some countries along with the change since 2000:

2007 % Change Since 2000
Canada 23% -50%
United Kingdom 38% 14%
United States 43% 19%
France 54% 14%
Germany 58% 12%
Japan 91% 50%
Italy 101% -4%


So as bad as our debt is (or was at the end of 2007), it is not nearly as bad a Japan or Italy.

Here's the size of GDP (in dollars) of some countries and how that has changed since 2000:

2007 % Change
(Billions) Since 2000
Ireland $ 261 170%
Saudi Arabia $ 382 102%
Taiwan $ 383 19%
Switzerland $ 427 71%
Sweden $ 455 85%
Australia $ 909 133%
Korea $ 970 89%
Mexico $ 1,023 63%
India $ 1,101 138%
Russia $ 1,290 397%
Brazil $ 1,314 104%
Canada $ 1,436 98%
Italy $ 2,105 91%
France $ 2,594 95%
United Kingdom $ 2,804 89%
China $ 3,280 174%
Germany $ 3,321 74%
Japan $ 4,382 -6%
United States $ 13,808 41%



I understand that China and India are booming quickly because they started so poor. Russia is booming for similar reasons along with huge resource wealth. It certainly helps explain why Putin is so popular. It's kind of hard to have a country where the economy has quadrupled in 7 years and have people be unsatisfied. What's up with Australia? How did they grow so quickly? Poor Japan; is that the future for the US?

Here's a fun table. I combined GDP with population to see which countries had the largest GDP per capita:


$ of GDP % Change
Per Person Since 2000
India $ 941.56 113%
China $ 2,483.04 163%
Brazil $ 6,937.91 84%
Russia $ 9,074.71 413%
Mexico $ 9,716.67 51%
Saudi Arabia $15,724.73 71%
Taiwan $16,697.75 16%
Korea $20,015.50 84%
Japan $34,296.17 -7%
Italy $35,745.01 85%
Germany $40,400.40 74%
France $42,033.79 86%
Australia $43,163.97 112%
Canada $43,673.92 85%
United States $45,725.36 31%
United Kingdom $46,098.31 83%
Sweden $49,600.76 79%
Switzerland $58,511.30 68%
Ireland $60,209.03 136%


Look at the Irish go! Notre Dame may be having a tough time, but the Irish are spanking in the GDP realm. Not a very good looking report card for Bush? Aside from Taiwan (I didn't realize they were sucking wind so bad) and Japan (when will they ever recover?), the US is bottom of the list. Heck, Mexico is putting a hurt on us in GDP/person growth.

OK, a lot of that appears to be do to currency changes that have not helped the US dollar. Here is the same chart in terms of purchasing power parity. The numbers represent some sort of "international dollar".


GDP per % Change
Person Since 2000
India 2,563 76%
China 5,325 124%
Brazil 9,703 35%
Mexico 14,120 33%
Russia 14,705 93%
Saudi Arabia 22,852 33%
Korea 24,803 60%
Taiwan 30,322 50%
Italy 30,365 24%
France 33,509 29%
Japan 33,596 33%
Germany 34,212 30%
United Kingdom 35,634 39%
Australia 36,226 35%
Sweden 36,578 39%
Canada 38,614 34%
Switzerland 41,265 33%
Ireland 43,414 51%
United States 45,725 31%


Things don't look quite so bad in those terms. I can't say that I understand the whole purchasing power parity thing, though. No matter how you slice it, China may have a big economy, but it still has really poor people. They are producing 1/3 the value per person as Mexico.

Saudi Arabia may be making loads off of oil (or was in '07), but I guess they don't make much else. On a per capita basis, they aren't that rich.

Stuff must be expensive in the UK. They are just ahead of the US in $ of GDP/person, but in terms of PPP, they are significantly behind.

Didn't Ireland used to be poor? I never recall them making the list of "rich" countries when I was in school. What changed?

 

[Galahad]

So if only 39% percent of Italians have a job but job growth was 10%, that means that even fewer worked before (like about 35%)!

 

[MarkBarbieri]

So if only 39% percent of Italians have a job but job growth was 10%, that means that even fewer worked before (like about 35%)!

A little. Their population at the end of 2007 was 58.88 million. That's a 3% increase over their 2000 population of 57.044 million. Their number of people employed grew 10% from 21.08 million to 23.207 million. So in 2000, they had 37% of their population employed. That's the lowest figure I see in % employed for any given year in my sample.

Many countries didn't have data for number of people employed. It's interesting to see how stable that % of population employed is for countries. In Japan, where I expected an aging population to push the number down, they have been pretty flat (51% in 2000 to 50% in 2007).

Ireland saw the biggest increase in % employed (a 4% gain from 45% to 49%). Australia, Canada, and Korea all increased 3% (from various starting points). Only Japan showed a decrease.

It is interesting to see how stable the % employed numbers are within a country and how variable they are between countries. I wonder what that means. Are there large, stable differences between the countries in what part of their population works? Are the definitions of "employed" very different between countries?