The world’s economic gyrations make it tricky to put California’s economic might into a global perspective.
There’s no perfect yardstick of business heft. Even the often-used benchmark – gross domestic product, a broad measure of business output – is subject to various swings, including currency changes and numerous statistical revisions.
Nonetheless, my trusty spreadsheet used two recently updated GDP figures to calculate the theoretical world in which California is a stand-alone economy on the global stage.
State-level GDP figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis were compared with the International Monetary Fund‘s worldwide estimates of economies over the past 10 years. The business output was tracked in U.S. dollars and was not adjusted for inflation.
Here’s what this vanity scorecard tells us.
The world’s top two economies have been the same for 10 years. For 2025, the U.S. was No. 1 at $30.77 trillion, followed by China at $19.63 trillion.
Germany has been No. 3 for the past three years, with $5.05 trillion of business output last year.
Japan, the previous No. 3, was the world’s fourth-largest economy by this GDP metric last year at $4.44 trillion.
Then, California ranked No. 5, with an average GDP of $4.3 trillion in 2025. California has been the world’s fifth-largest economy for all 10 years tracked.
After California, the United Kingdom came in sixth at $4 trillion, followed by India at $3.92 trillion.
So what about 2026?
The IMF projects the same top three: The U.S. ($32.4 trillion), China ($20.9 trillion) and Germany ($5.5 trillion).
Japan’s estimate for this year is $4.38 trillion, the United Kingdom’s is $4.26 trillion, and India’s is $4.15 trillion.
What about California?
Well, if the state’s economy can grow at the same pace as the IMF’s 2026 estimate for the entire U.S., California’s GDP would finish 2026 at $4.52 trillion.
That would make the Golden State the world’s fourth-biggest economy on this bragging rights yardstick.
Jonathan Lansner is the business columnist for the Southern California News Group. He can be reached at jlansner@scng.com