CNN Says the Economy of Brazil bigger than UK, Russia

Check out the interesting interactive site.

I can't vouch for these figures, but they are attributed to the IMF, which seems reasonable. Who would have thought that Brazil, which continues to grow rapidly, has a greater GDP than the UK, Italy and Russia.

Of course, this data is of total GDP, not per capita GDP. Were we to go to per capita income, the order would be much different. Moreover, were we to look at the international importance of different countries, we might better look at imports and exports. For many purposes I suspect the European Union would be the more relevant economy than any of its constituent country economies, and the EU economy ranks right up there with that of the United States.