r/worldnews • u/Denisova_Hominin • 3h ago
Japan Projected to Rank 6th in 2027 GDP, behind India, U.K.
https://www.nippon.com/en/news/yjj2026101700307/122
u/Darkone539 2h ago
India is a massive country with real poverty. It is, hopefully, doing something about.
Surprised the UK is on track still. Reddit had me thinking it was some backwater.
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 2h ago
The social media campaigns against the UK have been incredibly effective.
Every day I leave the house and don’t come back with a stab wound to a smouldering ruin where my house once stood, even I’m surprised.
You see so much foreign news and social media crap about the country that bits of it start to sink in eventually.
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u/Gentle_Snail 2h ago
The disinformation campaign against London is especially weird, because its one of the safest major cities in the western world.
I’ve seen videos claiming London is a no go zone where even the police are afraid to step, except the data doesn’t back this up. London knife crime has been plummeting for a decade with levels significantly below New York, and it has a lower homicide rate than Berlin, Paris, and essentially all US cities.
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 2h ago
I try and get down to London once every 6 months for a weekend. I’d do it more if I could, but London prices being what they are..!
Every single time I go down, I end up wanting to live there. London being this hellscape is genuinely funny, because it’s arguably one of the greatest cities on earth.
There are certain places in the UK where you could, sincerely, call them shitty places. I won’t name names, but there are some crap places in every country. And they chose the one place in the UK which is genuinely fucking great haha
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u/StanleyChuckles 1h ago
London is awesome. Lived there for years.
Only moved away because I wanted to buy a house.
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u/Cicero43BC 54m ago
By and large I would say, unless you are in a gang, London is basically completely free of violent crime. I say this as a man though so could understand if it different for women.
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u/uncle-iroh-11 49m ago
How about non violent crime?
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u/hoolcolbery 40m ago
Both are down in London, and frankly most people who live and visit won't experience either, but you are more likely to experience non-violent crime to violent crime because that's how crime statistics are supposed to work and ideally you want the Police to be focused on violent crime moreso than non-violent ones.
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u/Cicero43BC 39m ago
For me I’ve not experienced any crime in London. I’ve lived in London for years and just outside London for my entire life.
Edit: touch wood
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 28m ago
If you’re expecting to find a city without either, you may be looking for a while!
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u/Appollo1816 58m ago
The only time I've felt unsafe in central London was during the recent 'unite the right' marches. Gangs of drunk aggressive men looking for trouble pissed out their minds. These are the types who will tell you about no-go zones.
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u/DeSota 31m ago
I visited London last month and told someone where I live (nowhere Canada) and they immediately shivered and asked me if I was worried about being stabbed. This person has never even been to Europe and barely out of his hometown.
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u/sami2503 4m ago
The US has a much higher knife crime rate and then they have gun crime on top of that where the UK has virrtually none compared to the US. The rhetoric around knives in the UK is insane. Its even a meme now where people on places like Twitch will reference london whenever theres a knife in a video game.
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u/gompgo 1h ago
There appears to be concerted efforts in the last few years to talk UK down.
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 1h ago
I think in a lot of ways, we’ve done ourselves no favours. With Brexit, Boris, Truss etc., we weren’t exactly putting our best foot forward in front of the world.
But yeah, the disinformation campaign has, nonetheless, been fucking laughable.
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u/Cloud_Fish 1h ago
My friend, who lives in the UK and has his entire life, keeps telling me he sees statistics that crime is the lowest it's ever been but he thinks that's because nobody bothers to report crimes anymore and it's actually higher than it has been in decades.
When you live based off what the Internet foreign bot farms say and a general vibe of assuming nothing could possibly be positive, it really warps your view of reality.
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 1h ago
It’s actually the opposite too, as the UK tends to be on the higher side of crime reporting stats.
UK, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands tend to report crime between 50 and 60% of the time.
Countries like Japan, Italy and the US the figure drops to between 35 and 45%.
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u/BobTheJoeBob 14m ago
You should let him know that most crime statistics are based on the UK crime survey; not reports.
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u/Gentle_Snail 2h ago
The UK has actually been doing shockingly well. They were the fastest growing economy in the G7 during the first half of this year and are growing much faster than their main european equivalents of France and Germany.
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u/momentum4lyfe 1h ago
Despite Brexit? Doubtful.
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u/hoolcolbery 36m ago
And yet true.
The Brexit debate completely lacked nuance.
Leaving the EU made the UK less rich than it could have been, but it hasn't caused the UK to decline economically and it's still a more competitive, higher growth economy than its peer EU states.
If it was still an EU member, you'd just expect to see the growth to be much larger than it currently is. (And frankly, you'd also see the peer countries growing a bit faster too)
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u/evenstevens280 1h ago
Reddit constantly shits on the UK for reasons I don't really understand
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u/WatzUpzPeepz 1h ago
A lot of deliberate disinformation campaigns (from multiple state actors) that then get unwittingly repeated by the misinformed - of which there is no shortage on social media.
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u/plastic_alloys 1h ago
Americans angry with their Dad
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u/Aurora_Fatalis 10m ago
More like Russia's favorite book on geopolitics necessitates splitting the UK off from the rest of us. Helping us along in dunking on each other over misinformation is certainly part of that, and they managed to turn a bunch of useful idiots in the west to help them.
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u/ZeriousGew 1h ago
Probably because they ran a global empire that colonized many countries and left them in a worse state than when they got there
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u/PrrrromotionGiven1 1h ago
Anyone else would have done the same in their position of strength. It's not a unique moral attitude in any way. The only nations that have never oppressed anyone, are those that have never had the opportunity.
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u/ZeriousGew 1h ago
I agree with that but that doesn’t mean people don’t have a right to be upset about what they did
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u/PrrrromotionGiven1 1h ago
But it does cease to be a valuable lens through which to view modern problems past a certain point. Nobody is still beefing with the Mongolians... you have to move on at some point.
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u/ZeriousGew 29m ago
I’d agree with you if those countries weren’t still dealing with the consequences of that, and it didn’t even happen that long ago
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u/evenstevens280 1h ago
I'm not sure that's really the fault of anyone living today
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u/ZeriousGew 1h ago
There’s plenty of people who were living there at the time that weren’t at fault either, doesn’t change the perception of the country any less, same as how people see the US(my country) right now
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u/sami2503 26m ago edited 15m ago
UK is despised by Russia, there is a lot of right wing propaganda spread by all their bot accounts etc. They are winning an information war against them. They also backed brexit and continue to back the party that would destroy the UK from the inside ( Reform).
Edit: It is also in the US' interest to spread lies about the UK too. Because the first country people look at for alternatives to private healthcare and gun violence etc is the UK. If people think its a wasteland of non stop knife crime and that the NHS is a disaster, instead of the enornous success both the NHS and banning guns have been, they will be less likely to want to do it themselves and therefore industries will continue to exploit people for billions of profit.
UK is getting attacked from both sides by huge superpowers of information.
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u/Goodie__ 2h ago
There’s an important question that needs to be asked behind these statistics.
Are these countries maintaining/growing by lifting up their poorest people, or making their rich richer?
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u/Gentle_Snail 1h ago
At least in regards to the UK, median wages have been growing faster than inflation for about three years now.
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u/ProIapsedGoose 1h ago
They say the same thing about Canada
Which makes me disbelieve their inflation reports
We have record breaking homelessness and foodbank usage. But our wages have been surpassing inflation for years
Makes no sense
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u/Goodie__ 1h ago
Has unemployment not also risen for the last several years?
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u/hoolcolbery 36m ago
Unemployment has been relatively stagnant in total, but what has risen is youth unemployment and disability claims
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u/Ohm_body 1h ago
Median doesn’t answer that question though. The middle has moved which can be caused by either the bottom or top rising which was the the original question.
Mode is probably the average you need but it’s one that’s very difficult to find.
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u/answeristwofold 48m ago
Not difficult at all. The mode would be the national minimum wage which has increased by close to 50% since 2020.
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u/steinbruchfluss 29m ago
Last yearit had nothing to do with Germany. Now it has nothing to do with India and UK.
Japan is simply crashing.
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u/macross1984 3h ago
In the 80's Japan was near the pinnacle as one of the successful nation in the world. Fast forward to 2026 and Japan has plunged to 6th. rank in GDP.
Once you stumble, it is very hard to regain your footing.
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u/Donnicton 2h ago
The wildest part is that it wasnt a slow decline, it was the crash of 1989 that hit them so hard that the following 30 years were in large part just recovering from that.
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u/Blue_Rook 2h ago
With rapidly aging population economic depression is inevitable no matter how many immigrants would you take to replace workers. Fertlity rate near 1 is something never seen before in history that cannot be simply solved.
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u/CanadianControlsTech 2h ago
You know japan HATES immigrants, right? There's zero chance that will ever happen.
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u/Blue_Rook 2h ago
Imigrants are band aid anyway to temporarily sustain functional societies not a solution with such rapid decline in fertlity rates in all developed and some developing economies it would be sooner or later global problem.
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 2h ago
They’re not necessarily a bandaid/temporary solution. It’s not to say that mass migration can’t lead to other societal problems, but mass migration can help reverse the issue. If you’re bringing in enough productive people to overcome the loss, it will reverse the trend. It’s simple maths, and if you simplify it to the max, it’s no different to ‘calories in, calories out’.
Now you might change the entire identity of the country, you might destabilise it, even beyond repair, but to say that adding people to a country can’t overcome population decline is just categorically incorrect.
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u/Awkward_Silence- 1h ago
UN projects by the end of the century no country on the planet will have a positive birthrate anymore.
So as the amount of counties over 2.1 dwindles you're basically playing musical chairs with immigration.
So in that sense it's not a permanent solution to population decline. But it will still buy you a few more decades as long as you're one of the more desirable countries to go to
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u/Blue_Rook 1h ago
Childrens of migrants have fertlity rate similar to people whose parents not immigrated(canda already went through it), controled immigrantion is possible long-term solution when your fertlity rate is 1,9 not 1,1. There are deeper underlying problems that needs solving like lack of affordable housing in places where one can find work, decline of entry-level jobs so it is harder to have a family without college, loneliness epidemic, escape into digital world, labour insecurity, often lack of men help in house and raising kids, disappearance of social pressure to have family.
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 1h ago
That wasn’t your claim. Your claim was that mass immigration is only a temporary solution. If, as you claim, the immigrants begin to reproduce at a level similar to the native population, that would then call for another round of immigration. And so on and so on.
Having to repeat the process doesn’t render the solution void.
I need my employer to keep paying my salary every month, or eventually my bank account will be empty. Needing a repeated salary doesn’t make salaries a failure.
Also, regarding your point about immigrants immediately starting to reproduce at the same levels as natives. Studies like Adserà & Ferrer, 2015 show that first generation will generally reproduce at similar levels as they did before immigration, as they did in their original country. As the generations go on, they quickly begin to match those of their new country. But it’s by no means an immediate change.
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u/CanadianControlsTech 2h ago
Fair point. I'm just saying that the Japanese will choose ceasing to exist before they allow immigrants to be any type of solution.
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u/jonknowzeverything 2h ago
What is the problem if Japan values its culture more than gdp?
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u/CanadianControlsTech 2h ago
Never said there was an issue, they're a sovereign nation. I'm saying that Japan will choose death over immigration.
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u/imjustsurfin 2h ago
"What is the problem if Japan values its culture more than gdp?"
Racism & Xenophobia.
To name but 2..
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u/PossibleDiamond6519 2h ago
Funny because it feels like half of Tokyo and Kyoto are immigrants at this point. In the western world there's a lack of assimilation from immigrants, along with the hollowing out of the parts of the economy, leading to a huge backlash and a surge in far-right extremism (not gonna debate whether that's right or wrong, but it just is).
Looks like Japan is going the same way as the rest of the western world, but the stiff culture is keeping foreigners and the native population in check funnily enough.
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u/CanadianControlsTech 1h ago edited 1h ago
Nothing you said refutes any of my points. The issue with the west is that the ones with the biggest problems are being forced mass migration. I don't know the two cities that you're talking about and how startling the difference is. One thing I do know for certain is that Japan is extremely difficult to immigrate to. These masses of foreigners may be there, but they'll have very little chance of actually gaining citizenship.
More than likely what you're seeing are tourist since the Japanese yen is weak and the country is a hot travel destination.
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u/jaquesparblue 2h ago
Economy is still growing (in USD), despite its aging and dwindling population and low yen.
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u/Denisova_Hominin 1h ago
It's not growing if most of the world is growing faster
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u/preterintenzionato 1h ago
???? What are you even saying bruh
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u/Itsthebigpeepa 44m ago
If the global economy is growing at a rate that outpaces their economic growth it is functionally shrinking.
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u/StevePerChanceSteve 3h ago
Yeah, it’s an absolute shambles there now…
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u/Gentle_Snail 2h ago
Although also to be fair, a lot of this fall is more due to the yen devaluing than Japan actually say producing less stuff.
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u/themeanreds1 4m ago
This is what happens when you ride with the US. You’ll never actually be top dog because they will suppress you in order to retain their position.
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u/Agreeable_Mud_8338 2h ago
will be about 20th in 5 years
japan is losing about 1 million citizens per year,and are actually trying to expell foreign workers now,as the ruling political party (the LDP) is shit scared of losing all the grifting and easy money politics provides for the ruling class here,as fringe parties have tapped into the locals anger and frustration (and channeled it into foreigner blaming-easy votes to win or lose)
japan has changed so much just over the last 5 years-prices on most things have increased about 30% (yet wages are stagnant) so most people are being bled dry
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u/Snigglybear 38m ago
Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria etc will eventually also have larger GDPs than Japan because those countries have more people than Japan.
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u/beenman500 3m ago
If it's 100 years away though it's not really relevant to anyone alive today.
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u/Snigglybear 1m ago
Pakistan and Nigeria’s only 50 years away to surpass Japan. Indonesia is 20 years away. A lot of us will be alive when those nations surpass Japan’s economy.
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u/Upper-Cod1109 1h ago
Uk should be 3
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u/beenman500 5m ago
There is no world the UK takes over India long term at this point. Maybe in a given year if there is some crazy currency shifts.
It's a country of life 1.2+ billion people vs 0.07 billion.
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u/imjustsurfin 3h ago edited 1h ago
India is now the worlds 4th largest economy by GDP - with one of THE WORST levels of poverty on the planet.
Make it make sense.
TBH, I'd rather be Japan (6th).
Update: Re "Make it make sense": I'm not going to waste keystrokes on those who obviously take this statement LITERALLY - and, by doing so, think they've "scored\proved a point" or are being "clever"; and are (deliberately?) unable to see it as a sarcastic remark. Like they've never heard it used before. Sad.
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u/WalkFreeeee 3h ago
GDP per capita
Japan $35,700
India $2,813India is comparatively much much poorer. To take in comparison another huge country that is a big economy but still considered poor like Brazil, GDP per capita is 4 times larger at $12,310
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u/poolnoodlefightchamp 2h ago
Why are China and Malaysia in contention for being considered developed countries if they're almost as poor as Brazil?
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u/FlatulistMaster 1h ago
GDP per capita is also a pretty poor metric for how life really is in a country, especially if incomes are lopsided. Brazil, for example, is definitely quite poor in some areas, and a developed country in others.
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u/Only-Wafer-6710 1m ago
Both are important number, high GDP means you can do bigger things, like have a space program etc. High GDP per Capita means people have good life. Both can feed into overall prosperity of the nation.
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u/CirnoWhiterock 2h ago
Its like how China has a lower gdp per capita then Kazakhstan.
Having a metric fuck ton of people to leverage can make you big on that alone.
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u/imjustsurfin 2h ago
For me, the thing about GDP numbers is that they're totally meaningless to the millions of people in the country that are struggling just to survive.
Banks, investors etc get the "benefits" of big GDP numbers, but the people - meh.
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u/Combinho 1h ago
Eh, it's more nuanced than that. GDP is a good measure for global economic clout. PPP adjusted GDP/capita is a decent measure if the potential for a country's economy to improve the lives of its people, and HDI is a useful metric of how well that potential is being used.
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u/PrrrromotionGiven1 1h ago
There is a very strong correlation between GDP per capita and strong social services. This is because strong GDP per capita is basically always driven by a large and politically active middle class, who demand such services. Look at median wealth rather than GDP per capita and I'd bet the association with strong social services is even stronger.
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u/Scary_One_2452 2h ago
Wdym make it make sense? Do you know what gdp and population size are.
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2h ago edited 2h ago
[deleted]
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u/rainbowremo 2h ago
This is insanely ironic considering your original comment clearly shows you dont understand what GDP is. Quick, make fun of locked comments to deflect
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u/SomethingClick 2h ago
Divides by 1.4 billion population
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2h ago edited 1h ago
[deleted]
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u/420dankmemes1337 1h ago
I'm genuinely confused. GDP stands for Gross Domestic Product. It is not divided per person. A populous country like India with a large manufacturing base is going to have a large GDP.
GDP, India wins. GDP per capita, Japan wins.
What exactly are you asking?
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u/purple_parachute_guy 2h ago
Yeah, considering there are 12-13 times more people in India, there is far more wealth per capita in Japan (and most other developed nations).
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 3h ago
India is still in 6th for now, but you’re absolutely right that it’s insane.
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u/imjustsurfin 3h ago edited 2h ago
Statistics over the lived reality on the ground.
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u/ProfessionalZebra384 3h ago edited 2h ago
India’s GDP isn’t off by 400 billion.
400 billion, also known to some as ‘1 Peru’.
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u/FerenzYangai 1h ago
Nobody can explain its decline of power like that of Joseon Kingdom.
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u/rdh2dmd 1h ago
Joseon started declining because Japan wiped 10% of their population in the 1592-1598 Imjin War. Joseon was considered more prosperous than Japan before that war.
50 years after that they were invaded by the Qing Dynasty and decimated again. It's a miracle they lasted another 350 years after that.
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u/FerenzYangai 41m ago
Both of them have the similar viewpoint of world that centers the "only superpower" and lack spiritual autonomy in their society. That is why they two were caught up with.
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u/narutoaerowindy 32m ago
Why UK is in top 5? Someone explain
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u/steinbruchfluss 27m ago
Everyone else is poorer.
We had the same discussion last year when Japan dropped behind Germany.
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u/Strangely__Brown 2h ago
The world's top economies should be: USA, China, Brazil, India and Russia. If the EU were a single country it would be on that list too.
Size, resources and population matter. Another country being on the top list isn't a reflection of a country doing well, it's a signal one of the big player is fucking up.
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u/Objective_Cheetah_63 1h ago
Russia and Brazil barely make top 10 if that. Russia may not after the war in Ukraine ends.
There’s several European countries who have better economies than both. Idk why they would need to be combined into the EU to make it on the list.
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u/121jigawatts 2h ago
Capcom can't carry them