The world's largest economies

Five charts to start your day

Forget everything you thought you knew about the global economy. This data visualisation that I published last week will shatter your worldview. Ditch the "nominal" and embrace the "PPP" measure of GDP. China is now the world's largest.

I used something here called Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP. It's not about exchange rates – it's about what money can actually buy in each country. And the story is revealing. I used the Maddison Project data and inflation adjusted it to 2024, given that we had such a lot of inflation post-Covid. And I've paired this with data from the World Bank and estimates from the IMF.