5.12.10

Euro Zone Members as U.S. States

By Phil Izzo
Source: Wall Street Journal

Ireland is a small economy. How small? Its total output is roughly that of the state of Connecticut. But its troubles threaten to spread to other European economies, some small (like Portugal) and some sizeable (like Spain.)

To get a sense of scale, Real Time Economics compared the 2009 output of goods and services for members of the euro zone to the output of U.S. states. The economy of Spain, for instance, is about the same size as the combined economies of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas. Italy is nearly as big as Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Kentucky combined.

Meanwhile, hopes for rescue rest on the shoulders of France, whose economy is bigger than that of the entire West Coast including Alaska, Hawaii and the U.S.’s largest state California, and on Germany, which is about the size of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina — plus the District of Columbia.

The smallest euro-zone economies aren’t even as big as the smallest U.S. state. The economy of Cyprus is smaller than the economy of Vermont. And tiny Malta, for example, has a smaller GDP than that of the city of Amarillo, Texas. In all, the gross domestic product of the euro zone in 2009 was 12% smaller than that of the U.S.

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