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A comment on Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis?. Parent comment

Re:Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis? by snambi on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @11:15AM (#11389859)
You need to adjust for the currency. Rupee is artificially lowered to boost exports. Italy has 58M people. India has 1.25B people. This is approximately 25 times. So, India needs at-least 25x food, cloths, housing etc. If you take actual quantity and calculate using dollar terms, it would result in india being much bigger economy than Italy.
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Re:Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis? by arethuza on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @11:54AM (#11390197)
But doesn't that imply that comparing national GDPs is silly then - because presumably you could make that kind of argument about any country?
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Re:Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis? by akiselev on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @12:12PM (#11390323)
India is richer than Italy because it has 25 times more people/food? That's absolute nonsense.

If you take actual quantity and calculate using dollar terms, this is what you get: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...

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Re:Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis? by arethuza on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @12:28PM (#11390465)
That's interesting - so if you ignore the EU as not really being a country the #1 is China.
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Re:Is India facing its worst-ever water crisis? by akiselev on Wednesday March 30, 2016 @01:14PM (#11390985)
Yes, in aggregate the PPP GDP of China is #1, just slightly ahead of the United States, both of which are just below the European Union (which, to be fair, is like the US but with each state having more sovereignty in the federal system).

The picture is complicated by the relative populations though. Per capita, the EU is $25k, China is $13k, US is $54k, Germany is $46k, and India is only $6k. Unfortunately, the PPP calculation is very complicated and controversial so I don't really know how valid or useful these numbers are. Unless we're going for a trivial definition, it also doesn't say much about availability of luxuries, infrastructure, stability of government/economy, etc. so it's not a 1:1 mapping of wealth.

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