June 08, 2012
As we all know, the folks at the Washington Post have some trouble with arithmetic. Back in 2007 a lead editorial on NAFTA told readers that Mexico’s GDP had quadrupled from 1988 to 2007. The actual increase was a bit more than 83 percent.
In the same vein, columnist David Ignatius sang the praises of Turkey’s economy in the paper today. He told readers:
“its economy has grown an annual average of 5.3 percent since 2002, the fastest rate of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; gross domestic product has more than tripled.”
Let’s see, 5.2 percent growth for a decade? That translates into an increase of 66.0 percent in my neighborhood. If we go directly to the IMF’s site we find that Turkey’s GDP has increased by 61.8 percent over this period. That’s pretty good (much better than Mexico), but quite far from tripling.
So chalk up another big arithmetic error in the measurement of developing country GDP in the WAPO. Math is so hard.
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