'Ridiculously large'

Floridians who show up for work every day get a lot done — at least in comparison to Indonesia.

How much more? According to a unique study from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Florida had a similar GDP in 2015, $883 billion, as Indonesia, with a GDP of $859 billion. But the Sunshine State, AEI reports, reached its GDP on a workforce of 9.3 million people. That's about 8% of the size of Indonesia's workforce of 115 million people.

Florida's GDP is the fourth largest nationwide, behind California, Texas and New York, states the AEI report, which compares every state's GDP to the foreign country that has the closest economic output. In addition to Indonesia, Florida's GDP also outdoes the Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland and oil-rich Saudi Arabia, among many other nations. The Sunshine's State's GDP is more than the combined GDP of Austria and Belgium.

Mark Perry, an AEI scholar and editor of Carpe Diem, a popular economics blog, is the lead publisher of the study. The institute used data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the International Monetary Fund to make the comparisons. Perry, in the report, says one reason he wanted to do the study was to reinforce the sheer size, and success, of the American economy.

“Adjusted for the size of the workforce, there might not be any country in the world that produces as much output per worker as the U.S.,” Perry writes. “So let's not lose sight of how ridiculously large and powerful the U.S. economy is, and how much wealth, output and prosperity is being created every day in the largest economic engine ever in human history.”

Some other nuggets from the survey:

The U.S. produced 24.5% of the world GDP in 2015, with about 4.5% of the world's population;

California, Texas and New York, if a separate country, would each be among the 11 largest economies in the world;

California, with a $2.46 trillion GDP, slightly edges France, which had a GDP of $2.42 trillion last year. California posted its GDP with 19 million employees, significantly less than
France's workforce of 25 million people. If it were a country, California would be the sixth-largest economy in the world, behind the United Kingdom, which had a GDP of $2.85 trillion.