World Economy Top 50

John Spacey, July 12, 2020

The world economy is the value produced and distributed by global societies. This requires labor, talent, knowledge, capital and efficient conditions such as political stability and low corruption. The world economy is typically measured as a dollar amount known as gross domestic product (GDP) that counts the value of all final goods and services produced in a year. This says nothing about how goods are distributed and doesn't subtract economic bads created by an economy. As such, GDP doesn't necessarily translate to a higher standard of living or quality of life. The following chart sorts countries according to nominal GDP.

Rank	Country	GDP (Trillions US $)
1	United States	21.43
2	China	14.34
3	Japan	5.08
4	Germany	3.85
5	India	2.87
6	United Kingdom	2.83
7	France	2.72
8	Italy	2.00
9	Brazil	1.84
10	Canada	1.74
11	Russian Federation	1.70
12	South Korea	1.64
13	Spain	1.39
14	Australia	1.39
15	Mexico	1.26
16	Indonesia	1.12
17	Netherlands	0.91
18	Saudi Arabia	0.79
19	Turkey	0.75
20	Switzerland	0.70
21	Poland	0.59
22	Thailand	0.54
23	Sweden	0.53
24	Belgium	0.52
25	Argentina	0.45
26	Nigeria	0.45
27	Austria	0.45
28	Iran	0.45
29	United Arab Emirates	0.42
30	Norway	0.40
31	Israel	0.40
32	Ireland	0.39
33	Philippines	0.38
34	Singapore	0.37
35	Hong Kong SAR (China)	0.37
36	Malaysia	0.36
37	South Africa	0.35
38	Denmark	0.35
39	Colombia	0.32
40	Egypt	0.30
41	Bangladesh	0.30
42	Chile	0.28
43	Pakistan	0.28
44	Finland	0.27
45	Vietnam	0.26
46	Romania	0.25
47	Czech Republic	0.25
48	Iraq	0.23
49	Peru	0.23
50	Greece	0.21
N/A	World	87.75

Notes

All data is for 2019 except for Iran which is a 2017 number.

All data is in trillions of US dollars to convert to billions multiply by 1000x.

Per capita GDP is a more accurate ranking of the economic development of nations. For example, Pakistan and Finland have similar GDP but Pakistan's population is over 200 million people and Finland's is less than 6 million.

The numbers above are based on exchange rates with the US dollar. This is known as nominal GDP. There is another method for calculating GDP known as purchasing power parity (PPP) that is not represented above.