I am fortunate to have a copy of Mathematica a wonderful software that allows one to make sophisticated computations and that of late contain a wealth of statistical information.
I was very interested to know for example how Cuba compare economically with other countries with similar population.
If one runs the following mathematica command
Reverse[Sort[{CountryData[#, "Population"], CountryData[#]} & /@
CountryData[]]]
We get a list of pairs containing the country population and the Country Name sorted in descending order something like
{{1.29801*10^9, “China”}, {1.15175*10^9, “India”}, {3.02841*10^8,
”UnitedStates”}, {2.28864*10^8, “Indonesia”}, {1.89323*10^8,
”Brazil”}, {1.60943*10^8, “Pakistan”},..
When we look in that statistical table in the Cuban vecinity the list of countries that have similar population are
{1.64654*10^7, “Chile”}, {1.6379*10^7, “Netherlands”}, {1.53143*10^7, \
“Kazakhstan”}, {1.43585*10^7, “BurkinaFaso”}, {1.41966*10^7, \
“Cambodia”}, {1.37367*10^7, “Niger”}, {1.35707*10^7, “Malawi”}, \
{1.32282*10^7, “Zimbabwe”}, {1.3202*10^7, “Ecuador”}, {1.30286*10^7, \
“Guatemala”}, {1.20725*10^7, “Senegal”}, {1.19684*10^7, “Mali”}, \
{1.16962*10^7, “Zambia”}, {1.12667*10^7, “Cuba”}, {1.11225*10^7, \
“Greece”}, {1.05787*10^7, “Portugal”}
For comparison then we could use countries like Greece, Portugal and even Chile.
In the following diagrams the red dot is Cuba the diagrams are logarithmic plots of the statistical information using the data contained in mathematica. The source of the data for mathematica seems to be the CIA World Fact Book.
The above diagram red dot shows Cuban population and the green diagram Chile’s population the rest of the blue dots are all the population of other countries in the world sorted in decreasing order.
GDP per Capita comparison between Cuba and Chile
Again in the above diagram the red dot is for Cuba’s GDP percapita (about 4500) and the green dot is the GDP per capita for Chile (about 6832.67) .
As can be seen two Latin American countries very close on the number of inhabitants the GDP per capita for Chile is much bigger than Cuba’s GDP that is not even counting that the actual mean salary paid by the Cuban government is about 200 dollars a year. If we put that value as the GDP per capita then Cuba would go to the bottom of the list.
Here is a similar comparison between Cuba and Portugal (The poorest country in Europe)
Cuba and Portugal population
and below the same diagram comparing the GDP per capita of Cuba to the GDP per capita of Portugal.
Cuba GDP per capita versus Portugal GDP per capita
The lesson we can draw from this is that economically the capitalist countries are better than a communist country.
Below I include the mathematica code I have use to produce the graphs
value := “Population”
countries := Reverse[Sort[CountryData[#, value] & /@ CountryData[]]]
cuba := If[# == CountryData["Cuba", value], #, 0] & /@
Reverse[Sort[CountryData[#, value] & /@ CountryData[]]]
other := If[# == CountryData["Chile", value], #, 0] & /@
Reverse[Sort[CountryData[#, value] & /@ CountryData[]]]
ListLogPlot[{countries, cuba, other},
Background -> Black, AxesStyle -> Directive[Thick, Orange],
PlotStyle -> {Directive[Blue, PointSize[Small]],
Directive[Red, PointSize[Large]],
Directive[Green, PointSize[Large]]}
]
And this is the code for GDP per Capita
value := “GDPPerCapita”
countries := Reverse[Sort[CountryData[#, value] & /@ CountryData[]]]
cuba := If[# == CountryData["Cuba", value], #, 0] & /@
Reverse[Sort[CountryData[#, value] & /@ CountryData[]]]
other := If[# == CountryData["Chile", value], #, 0] & /@
Reverse[Sort[CountryData[#, value] & /@ CountryData[]]]
ListLogPlot[{countries, cuba, other},
Background -> Black, AxesStyle -> Directive[Thick, Orange],
PlotStyle -> {Directive[Blue, PointSize[Small]],
Directive[Red, PointSize[Large]],
Directive[Green, PointSize[Large]]}
]
