The British Guardian stated in March that the economic forecast is simple: the next 10 years are going to be a drag (dominated by deficit reduction, anaemic growth). So get ready for the austerity decade! Do you?
Half of the dynamics of the economy is about psychology, and perhaps it is time to draw a more positive picture of the global economy. Regardless of growth (or decline) in the GDP, the global economic activity hasn’t come to a standstill, and GDP is far from being 0. And that means (presumably) good news for the wealthy countries: The world hasn’t changed that much: The picture of global wealth is quite similar to that of 1990, and GDP distribution did not change the dominance of the industrialized countries. Probably it is time to stop worrying about growth, but think about tackling these global inequalities in wealth.
The newly drawn maps show the countries of the world resized according to their estimated GDP in Purchasing Power Parity for the years 2010 and 2015 (using data from the IMF, with projections for 2015 made using the approach as described in on the worldmapper website):

(click for larger map)

(click for larger map)

To complete the picture, we have also drawn the maps of the raw GDP figures without re-calculating them to PPP. So these are the same maps, but comparing the GDP in U$ – the patters remain the same, but the so called western countries appear even bigger:

(click for larger map)

(click for larger map)

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