State GDP from Bureau of Economic Analysis (Map by Flourish)
Could California lose its bragging rights as the world’s fifth-largest economy?
My trusty spreadsheet found that the Golden State could fall one notch in 2024 to fast-growing India in this theoretical ranking of economic heft, as measured by Gross Domestic Product – a broad measure of business output.
Let’s start by noting that California businesses produced $3.86 trillion worth of goods and services in 2023, as tracked by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Now, we’ll put that into a global perspective using figures from the International Monetary Fund.
In 2023, only four national economies were larger than California, by GDP math – the US at $27 trillion (that’s with California included), China at $17.7 trillion, Germany at $4.4 trillion, and Japan at $4.2 trillion.
But India…
