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07 September 2011

GDP and Industrial Output Comparisons by Country

I needed to find out if China was the number 1 manufacturing nation in the world or was it the United States?  This proved a bit more difficult question than I thought it would be.  But the CIA World Factbook had the information needed to determine this and to calculate the actual value of each of the three sectors into which they divide the GDP for the year 2010.  These sectors are Agriculture, Industry, and Services.  The results I found for the 7 nations with the largest GDPs expressed in dollars with purchasing power parity are given in the following table:


The answer to my original question is that the value of China's industrial output, which includes mining and construction, is $4.73 trillion, while that for the United States is $3.24 trillion.  China's industrial output is 46% greater than that of the United States.  No other nation comes close to having so much industrial output as China or the United States.  The value of China's agricultural output is also the largest in the world.  In this case, it is 6 times that of the United States.  It is the delivery of services that the U.S. excels in doing.

The per capital GDP for the United States is more than 6 times that of China.  Germany has the second highest per capita GDP on the list and that of the U.S. is 32% higher.  The United Kingdom and Japan both have per capita GDPs very nearly as great as that of Germany.  This group has a per capita GDP more than twice that of Russia, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of China, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of India.

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