Five Ways to Read an Economy
Six economies across five macro lenses — growth, unemployment, external balance, savings and manufacturing
- Unit
- Percent (per spoke)
- Frequency
- Annual
- Coverage
- Latest available, 2021–2025
- Evidence Quality
- Medium
Six economies, five macro lenses at once — no polygon reaches the rim on every spoke.
Radar chart. Five macro lenses · each spoke scaled to its own range. It covers United States, China, India, Germany, Japan and Brazil.
Each spoke is min–max scaled to its own range across the six economies, so distance from centre means 'high on that raw scale', not 'healthier' — on the unemployment spoke, further out is more joblessness.
Question
Read one economy across five different lenses at once — growth, jobs, external balance, savings and industry. Does any country lead on all five, or does each lens rank them differently?
Evidence
Each polygon traces one economy across the five spokes. Because every spoke is scaled to its own min–max, a large polygon is not a 'health score' — it just means high raw readings on these particular five scales, which lean toward production and thrift rather than services or finance.
Observation
Read the overall shape, then the spokes where it bulges or caves.
Distance from the centre is comparable within a spoke, not across spokes. Outward always means a higher raw value: on unemployment that is more joblessness, and on current account it is a larger surplus (deficits sit toward the centre).
Assessment
- No economy leads all five. China tops savings (about 43% of GDP, 2024) and manufacturing (about 25% of GDP, 2025), yet it is India — not China — that posts the fastest growth (roughly 7.6% versus 5.0% in 2025).
- The US and Brazil sit near the centre on the accumulation spokes: they run the two lowest savings rates of the six (about 17% and 14% of GDP) alongside current-account deficits, so on these production-and-thrift lenses their polygons are the smallest.
- Japan is the external-and-labour outlier — the widest current-account surplus (about +4.9% of GDP, 2025) and the lowest unemployment (about 2.5%) — despite the second-slowest growth of the six after Germany.
Advantage
- Where does the fastest growth actually come from?The Growth Divergence
- Why does China save so much more than the US?The Savers
- Who runs the surpluses and who runs the deficits?Creditors and Debtors