Created in Chatgpt using data sourced from IMF and World Bank.

I wanted to see how countries grew relative to the US. I added the per capita to normalize for any population growth effects and subtracted out debt to adjust for growth since I wanted to see real growth and not any sort of deficit funded growth. Maybe not a perfect metric but it does yield some fascinating results

Posted by Dandyman51

3 comments

  1. Some curious things I observed were:

    1. The kink in the graph for India that aligned pretty well with the election of Narendra Modi

    2. The huge improvement for Vietnam over the last 25 years.

    3. The huge improvement for China until about 2010 after which it has been relatively flat

    4. Indonesia has a lower ratio than China when subtracting public debt but higher without it. I didn’t expect this and when you take away the debt element, China looks better. Though this does show the huge fiscal expansion China has gone through in the last decade.

  2. Interesting approach to normalizing growth data! Could you share some of the key findings or trends you observed from your analysis?

  3. Do you mean deficits and not debt? Deficits would make more sense.

    Removing public debt would mean comparing incomes but subtracting your total loan balances. Removing deficits means removing the difference between what the gvmnt collected and what what they spent.

    Nonetheless I’m not sure removing spending deficits make a lot of sense, since it’s quite common and ok to deficit spend insofar as it’s not above the growth level of your economy . . . Besides deficit spending does not have a 1:1 effect on the economy ( is $1 in deficit spending does not mean +$1 to the economy). It depends on how the money is used. Sometimes it produces 2:1 and sometimes it’s 1:0 or 1:4.

    Think for instance if the gvmnt took a deficit dollar and burned it for instance or just gave it to a rich corporation in a foreign country. On the opposite side other deficit dollars can generate greater than $1 for every $1 spent.

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