These statistics do not tell of trade flows between the three countries. They do not indicate, for example, that (unlike the U.S., as everyone seems keen to ensure that anything remotely negative about Canada is compared favorably against the U.S.) Canada’s economy is largely dependent on exports – which comprise 45% of Canada’s entire GDP – and that the United States buys 80% of those exports. (The U.S. is also responsible for 55% of Canadian imports.)

Similarly, many of these charts are clearly indexes, which do not accurately portray values relative to the size of each country. Yes, clearly there are more HIV and AIDs deaths in the United States. That has nothing to do with Canada having “better health care,” it has to do with the fact that the U.S. population is ten times that of Canada’s, and it has vastly more people with HIV and AIDs in the first place.

However, what most disturbs me is that Mint.com appears to be using PPP GDP in for its GDP comparisons, else Mexico’s GDP would not be listed as larger than Canada’s. PPP GDP has become a wildly overused method which is intended to measure things like normalized costs of living. It is NOT an accurate measure of countries on the international stage. For that, GDP at exchange rates is used. This should be intuitive, but strangely it is not, and PPP GDP is invariably used in the media, or by people with an agenda (for example those who wish to make China’s economy appear twice as large as it actually is), or those who simply do not know better. There is a simple truth that underscores the problem with using PPP GDP in this type of comparison: trade is not conducted in PPP values. China cannot buy everything for 50 cents on the dollar, even though its PPP GDP is twice as large as its EXCHANGE RATE GDP. International trade – exports of goods and services and manufacturing, imports of the same, trade of fundamental commodities, the sale and purchase of energy, the cost of shipping – is conducted at exchange rate values.

Economists are growing increasingly annoyed with the use of PPP GDP, and the CIA world factbook has, unfortunately, contributed to this misuse. At the very minimum, ANY discussion of aggregate and per-capita GDP that utilizes PPP GDP must also include exchange rate GDP.

if anything, it will get us prepared for the coming north american union!