America’s Ridiculously Large $16 Trillion Economy

The map was created by matching economic output in US states in 2012 to foreign countries with comparable GDPs, using BEA data for GDP by state here and GDP by country from the United Nations, via Wikipedia here. For each US state (and the District of Columbia), I tried to find the country closest in economic size in 2012 (measured by GDP), and for each state there was a country with a pretty close match – those countries are displayed in the map above and in the table below. Obviously, in some cases the closest match was a country that produced slightly more, or slightly less economic output in 2012 than a given US state.

It’s pretty amazing how ridiculously large the US economy is, and the map above helps put America’s GDP of $16.2 trillion in 2012 (and more than $17 trillion in Q4 2013) into perspective by comparing the GDP of US states to other country’s entire national GDP. For example:
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