The comparison isn't just economic. As a visitor, many things made more sense to me when I started seeing India through the lens of a confederation of mini-nations rather than a unified country in the American or European sense. Far more so than in America, each individual state has distinct cultures, cuisines, and languages. Historically many of them were once kingdoms themselves, which contributes to the sense of distinct identity.
Thought this might be relevant. There was a recent discussion on freelance job rates and the OP was worried that bids for US$10 per hour by people from India (etc) will make it hard for him to make higher bids.<p>Consider this. Working at $13 an hour, it equates to ~Rs.650.
650 * 25(days of working in a month) * 12 = Rs1,95,000 per annum, for working an hour a day. If I managed 3 hours of work at that 'cheap' rate, I'd be one of the highest earning person among my friends [who have all graduated in CS and work in various IT companies.] Pretty awesome to have a cheap economy, right? :)
equivalent map for the US (but without gdp per capita comparisons): <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/comparing_us_states_countries" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/comparing_...</a>
This is one of those articles where the graphic does a disservice to the content of the article, which has its own glaring problems. Not only that, they seem to be using absolute GDP numbers which are meaningless, because a $1 goes a much longer way in U.P. than it does in NYC. At the very least they should have used PPP numbers. Some glaring problems:<p>1) As the content of the article points out, Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state in India. This is why comparing them to Qatar in the graphic, just on the basis of similar absolute GDP numbers, is very misleading. Qatar's population is under 1.5M. Uttar Pradesh's population is nearly 200M.<p>2) Comparing Gujarat to Angola is like comparing the Silicon Valley Bay area to an arbitrary African country based on similar GDPs. Gujarat has one of the best infrastructure setups in all of India and has been amongst the fastest growing states for the past decade.<p>3) Almost all of Maharashtra's $175B GDP comes from the city of Mumbai. So if you want a comparison to Singapore, you should look at the city of Mumbai, not the state of Maharashtra.
This is what is most worrisome about India. The rich is getting richer and the middle class is improving but the poor on the whole has not moved a bit. With the rate the population grows the poor probably regressed. Its a shame because the outsourcing party is not going to last forever.
Page 4 of this PDF ranks US Cities (metro regions actually) as if they were nations. New York City's economy is bigger than Australia or Mexico. Chicago is bigger than Switzerland or Taiwan.
<a href="http://www.usmayors.org/metroeconomies/2011/charts.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.usmayors.org/metroeconomies/2011/charts.pdf</a><p>India's economy is < 1.5x the New York City metro area