[lbo-talk] New Imperialism

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Tue Mar 29 08:01:42 PST 2005


Should "imperialism" be in quotes , because such a large % of the U.S. portion of "world GDP" is produced domestically in the U.S. and not exploited from neo-colonies ?

CB

Doug Henwood

That's an old, old story, completely inappropriate to an analysis of

a "new" imperialism.

According to World Bank stats, the U.S. was 39% of world GDP in 1960.

That fell to 25% in 1980, and then rose to about 32% in 2002. (I'm a

little behind on updating this spreadsheet.) Some of this is exchange

rate effects, but in any case, the bulk of the decline happened by

1980.

The composition of the remaining share hasn't changed all that

dramatically. The "middle income" countries - those with per capita

incomes like Mexico or Brazil - were around 18% of world GDP in the

1970s, and are 16% today. The low-income countries were 5% of world

GDP in the late 1960s, and are 3-4% today. The "developing" countries

of East Asia and the Pacific (basically Asia excluding Japan) were 6%

in 1960, and are around 6% today. Latin America, 6% vs. 5%. The whole

of the OECD was 74%, and is now 78%. OECD ex-US, 35% then, 46% now.

Lots of that increase came from Japan, which was 3% in 1960 and was

12% in 2002 (which is down from 18% in the mid-90s). The OECD less US

& Japan was 32% in 1960, and 33% in 2002. So, most of the U.S.

decline happened quite a while ago, and the rest of the picture

hasn't changed all that much.

By the way, I'm using the World Bank's version of market exchange

rates (which averages several years rates to smooth out short-term

volatility) for this measure rather than PPP because I think PPP is

an appropriate technique for measuring domestic living standards and

market rates more appropriate for measuring countries' relative

economic weights in the world.

Doug



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