More geekery -- comparative economic indicators edition

"You must be older than the modern Indian economy in order to drink in this establishment.

I love the duality in the picture above (source); there are, indeed, many contradictions here.  On the one hand, for nearly a generation it has been the second-fastest growing economy in the world, after only China---and India, not China, ultimately will be the world's largest, or anyway is expected to.  On the other, still the greatest population of people living in poverty---on $2 a day or less---is found in India, not in Africa.

Here, for example, is a sample of economies that were about the size of India's in 1990; since then, India has fast outstripped them all, both the mature Northern economies and the dynamic Southern one:

(Programming note:  I would have included other countries to provide more thorough basis of comparison, but Google's public data charts get really flat when you include countries too far out of scale, such as China and the U.S.)  

But as much as that highlights the total growth of the Indian economy, it obscures the significant fact of India's 1.3 billion population.  That makes a huge difference when you compare how the larger economy actually translates into real people's living standards.  Here's the same basket of national economies, this time divided by population to show per-capita share (note the longer time frame along the bottom axis; again, Google public data editor flattens the data unattractively if I were to correct that error):

And there you have it.  India still has the fastest growth rate over this time series, but ... well, just look at it.  The effects are as hard to see on the ground as it is in the flattened graph above.  Even this remarkable rate economic growth, after more than two decades, still has yet to deliver modern living standards, or at least has yet to deliver them beyond India's new rich (more than 125,000 millionaires, and the fourth-most billionaires, with 55).  The growth is impressive---since 1990, India increased its per-capita economic activity 167%, from $1,200 to $3,200, where even the frenetic pace in Switzerland falls short of 50%.  But at the end of that period, the European countries have converged on the $40,000 figure that marks the world's rich countries, while even Mexico ($12,800) exceeds the worldwide per-human average of $9,000 of annual economic activity.  India is currently at about one-third that per-human average, and its economy generates nine dollars per Indian, per day, of total economic activity.