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Clearly we would all rather be on Ynys Môn: the Indian Ocean paradise of the Seychelles islands has an economy the same size as ours. |
Last February Peter Hain made waves and was accused of considerable complacency when he stated that Wales was wealthier than Rwanda. Seeing as we are in the dog days of the summer and there isn't much else happening on Ynys Môn (today's Daily Post top Anglesey story: "Amlwch hotel boss told to travel 25 miles to pay off 1p bill"), I thought I would take a look to see how the Welsh economy does compare to those in Africa. As it turns out Peter Hain is right: Wales is wealthier than Rwanda: some 8x more wealthy. With a GVA of approx. £45,514m Wales's economy is actually somewhere between that of Ethiopia (£39,517m) and Tunisia (£49,332m).
The size of Ynys Môn's economy (£780m) compares almost exactly to that of the Republic of Seychelles (£770m), the Island paradise in the Indian Ocean. Gwynedd (£1,620m) is the equivalent of Eritrea (£1,668m) and Conwy and Denbighshire (£2,543) on a parr with Sierra Leone (£2,566m). Wales's largest regional economy, that of Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan (£10,108), is somewhere in-between Equatorial Guinea (£10,007m) and Chad (£10,200m).
For benchmarking purposes, you may be interested to learn that Scotland's economy (£103,532m) is more than double the size of Wales's, and is somewhere between Morocco (£81,471m) and Algeria (£172,500m). Northern Ireland's (£28,827m) is just slightly larger than Cameroon's (£25,275m).
England's economy is off the scale (£1,083,289m) and in fact the entire economy of the UK (£1,295,663) is only slightly smaller than the GDP of all of Africa combined (£1,411,370).
The full figures are below.
For stats bods, I used the 2009 PPP-basis GDP figures for African countries (and converted to £ using the average USDGBP conversion rate for the same year). For UK and Wales regional economies, I have used the 2008 Headline GVA figures which are a useful comparator to GDP.