Insights From The Penn World Tables

The Penn World Tables, were created by Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten of the University of Pennsylvania.They reveal how much larger all the word’s economies have become over time. The Penn Tables provide GDP data for both 1960 and 2010, providing a 50 year window to view global economic progress. It has been considerable. Looking at absolute GDP, no country anywhere in the world for which we have data is smaller today than it was in 1960. The countries that saw the size of their economies less than double since 1960 contain just 80 million people—a little more than 1 percent of the planet’s population. A further 1 billion people lived in countries where GDP climbed by somewhere between two- and five fold. That leaves 4.9 billion people—the considerable majority of the planet—living in countries where GDP has increased more than five fold over 50 years. Read more of this post