The New York Times Misreports 'the World's Largest Economies'.

The March 12 2012 issue of the International Herald Tribune (a digest of the New York Times) carried a table of 'key figures of the world's largest economies'. (See the article entitled "World looks to U.S. consumers for rescue"). 

But the table does not report 'the world's largest economies'; not by conventional reckoning, or by its own choice of metric. 

The table includes Mexico and South Korea; with their $US GDPs for 2010 correctly recorded (at 1034B and 1014B, respectively).

But Spain hard a larger $US GDP than both these countries in 2010 (1410B).

So did Australia (1237B).

And neither Spain or Australia make their table.

There is, plausibly, a commercial benefit to the NYT in ensuring Mexico gets 'air time' in its newspapers.It may also be that their business page readers  have more  interest in Korea than Australia; after all, US trade with South Korea in 2011 was $US44,505m, compared with only $US27,515m for Australia.


But the Times did not state it was reporting 'key figures of the world's economies of most interest to our readers (and advertisers)'. What it did state was incorrect, at least by its own criterion of 'largeness'. 


For the record, the economies with the 15 largest GDPs in 2010, at current exchange rates and in $US B, are as follows:

Australia	1,237.36
Brazil	2,090.31
Canada	1,577.04
China	5,878.26
France	2,562.74
Germany	3,286.45
India	1,631.97
Italy	2,055.11
Japan	5,458.80
Korea	1,014.48
Mexico	1,034.31
Russia	1,479.83
Spain	1,409.95
United Kingdom	2,250.21
United States	14,526.55

(All data is drawn from http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/02/weodata/weoselgr.aspx)