Mark Perry, a member of the Center’s Board of Scholars and an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, has an interesting blog post today at Carpe Diem that lists the GDP of each state with a comparable foreign country.

Michigan, with a 2012 state GDP of $400 billion, ranks 13th in the nation and is comparable with South Africa, whose 2012 GDP was $383 billion.

California ranks first nationally, with a 2012 state GDP of slightly more than $2 trillion, or about the same as Italy. Perry notes that California, however, has about one-third fewer people than Italy. “That’s a testament to the superior, world-class productivity of the American worker,” he writes.

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