http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2011/12/28/chart-of-manufacturing-output-from-2000-to-2010-by-country/

But frankly there really isn’t much more to learn about them from a simple chart. You can see that from the UK has done remarkably poorly (similar to Japan) but that is about it.

The linking problem is if I link to the specific spreadsheet they delete it and post a new spreadsheet with a new url and break my link (which is what I used to do). The spreadsheet is huge and the data is scattered all over it. http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnltransfer.asp?fID=1

The data points are only showing every 5 years (I didn’t plot every single year). I am interested in general long term trends not individual blips – those blips are what 98% of the commentary and writing seems to be about.

You are right, the data is for current USA dollars for the year of the data not 2010 USA dollars.

I simply don’t believe it

One possible explanation is how things like iphones are accounted for; if the “value” is the sales price in the us (but all the hardware made offshore) that would account for a lot

I also don’t believe that there was no drop in 2008 – suggest that fine points in teh data are lost

The Chart Police Say
Charts with more then 3 lines need something other then color; the human eye can’t easily tell so many colors apart (not to mention, many men are color blind)

When you have time series data whre the absolute value (Y axis value) varies a lot, a linear Y axis is bad, cause you can’t see a change in slope in the low values. Better to use a % or log Y axis

ordeing the legend in order of the data (China on top, then US, etc) earns you a Valentine from the Chart Police
however, you get a fail cause the source takes you to a link with many excel files; you need to specify the file (and if it is big, where in the excel file)

And if that isn’t a Chinese bubble about to burst, I don’t know what is!