Here's a very cool data visualization from HowMuch.net that took me a minute to figure out because it's a little bit unorthodox. The way it works is that it visualizes the entire world's economic output as a circle. That circle is then subdivided into a bunch of blobs representing the economy of each major country. And then each country-blob is sliced into three chunks — one for manufacturing, one for services, and one for agriculture.
Check it out:
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You can see some cool things here.
- For example, compare the US and China. Our economy is much larger than theirs, but our industrial sectors are comparable in size, and China's agriculture sector looks to be a little bit larger. Services are what drive the entire gap.
- The UK and France have similarly sized overall economies, but agriculture is a much bigger slice of the French pie.
- For all that Russia gets played up as some kind of global menace, its economy produces less than Italy. Put all the different European countries together, and Russia looks pathetic.
- You often hear the phrase "China and India," but you can see here that the two Asian giants are in very different shape economically.
- The only African nation on this list, South Africa, has a smaller economy than Colombia.
