His proposed measure, gdp x gdp per capita, is neither a stock nor a netting of the flow of gdp.
In Nicaragua, official-aid flows reached almost 23% of GDP in 1997, and in Mozambique they amounted to over 37%.
In Kenya a third of GDP flows through a mobile money-transfer system set up by a private telecoms company.But Africa's entrepreneurs are often stymied by the state.
India's current account deficit, the broadest measure of trade including investment flows, is at 4.8% of GDP, while Indonesia's stands at 3.2%.
If we don't do this, a large diversified economy looks relatively closed because flows are a modest share of GDP, and smaller countries' connectedness is exaggerated because their flows are a higher share of GDP.
The state looms largest in France, where almost 50% of GDP flowed through the government's coffers in 2007 (the most recent year for which statistics comparable across all countries exist).
The proportion of GDP flowing to the federal, state and local governments in the form of individual and corporate taxation (28.3percentt in 2007) is at its lowest for 40 years, and the federal tax-take part of that -- at only 14.4percentt in 2011 -- is at its lowest level since 1950.
Annual global remittances are about $160bn – more than twice foreign aid flows and a big chunk of GDP in some countries.
Trade and financial flows, which, unlike the bulk of GDP, are transacted at market exchange rates, should be converted at those rates into dollars.
He points out that net public transfers of some euro75 billion, nearly 4% of GDP, still flow into Germany's former communist east every year.
