Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

A perspective on economic size

If you're looking for one way to offer students an expansion of their frames of reference, here's a good discussion starter.


The names on the states indicate nations which have a GDP about the same size as that state. (Click on the map to see a larger image.)

Commentary on the map is available at Strange Maps

That site found the map at The Big Picture, Macro Perspective on the Capital Markets, Economy, Geopolitics, Technoogy and Digital Media.

That site found the map at Carl Talk - Stormers Blog.

Carl found the map at The York Group, International Technology Partners. I couldn't find the map there.

To follow up, there's a rank list of national and US states' GDPs (from the IMF) at Wikipedia. California is listed as the 7th largest economy in the world.

A second follow up might be the second lesson in The Center for Learning's unit of lesson plans for AP Comparative Government and Politics. The "Economic Comparisons" part of the lesson points out that Wal-Mart's gross sales for 2004 were just below Saudi Arabia's GDP that year. And General Electric's gross sales were a bit higher than Nigera's GDP. The lesson asks, in part, students to distinguish between companies and nation-states.

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