GDP is not the best of measures but it is what we use to meaure economies. Globally, (in 2023) that totals more than $100 trillion.
My post-pandemic work is primarily focused on the bottom left slice of this big pie, in Africa. That continent’s GDP is more than $3 trillion, and even 1 trillion dollars is a lot of dollars, but in comparison to the rest of the world, is tiny. Smaller still as my work is focused on Sub-Saharan African, so ignore the EGY-and-neighbors piece of that slice, and I purposefully skip South Africa, which is the ZAF triangle. What remains is the middle of that slide, which economically is the size of Canada. Or perhaps Australia.
One way to look at that is to say SSA is on par with Canada or Australia when it comes to global investment capital. That feels about right. The difference is that Canada and Australia has quite a bit of internal investment capital. Which makes sense given those two countries have 38 million and 26 million citizens whereas SSA has over 1.2 billion. That is over 30 Africans for each Canadian. Over 45 Africans for every Australian.
What else to note is that the GDP of South America is not much bigger than Africa. That was news to me. Again there is a difference in population sizes, 422 million people vs. 1.2 billion. That 3:1 ratio makes a big difference. It’s the difference between middle income countries and poor countries. $3,000-$5,000 per capita GDPs = $10-$15/day incomes vs. $1,000-$2,000 = $2-$5/day.
The other surprising section to me was the Middle East, which is a bit bigger than South America and Africa, but not commensurate with the amount of news coverage. I would have guessed the oil and oil-supported economies would be a much higher percentage of the global total. Noting too that Turkey’s economy is the same size as Saudi Arabia, despite Turkey not being an oil state.
More analysis at visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-105-trillion-world-economy
