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Video: 35 Years of World Economic Evolution in 20 Seconds

Watch GDP for the world’s countries change over decades

We previously have posted similar Voronoi diagrams in the past showing a breakdown of global GDP by country, as well as $60 trillion in world debt.

Today’s video takes a similar approach, but focuses on the evolution of the global GDP breakdown over time. It does not show GDP in absolute terms, but instead illustrates changes to each country’s contribution using annual data from the IMF.

The most obvious observation to note is China’s rise and eventual dominance of the Asian sector of the diagram. The time series starts with Japan as the biggest Asian economy by far, with output greater than all Asian countries combined. At the beginning of the Lost Two Decades (1991-2010), Japan is the 2nd biggest economy in the world, reaching a height of 17.4% of the global economy in 1994. By the end of this challenging period in Japanese history, it gets easily and clearly surpassed by the emerging Chinese giant.

Also noteworthy is that North America has two separate peaks on the recent global economic landscape. First, in 1985 it peaks at 40.1% of global output. It subsequently recedes to a trough of 28.1% a decade later. Then, just after the Dotcom crash in 2001, it re-peaks at 36.6% of worldwide GDP. Today it sits at around 28% again.

The good people of HowMuch.net, a cost comparison website, also make other observations in their article associated with the video here.