The World has a total GDP of about 60 trillion US dollars, and 14 trillion of that is turned over by the United States of America alone. That means that the US earned almost a quarter of all the World's new wealth in 2008, the year in which both sets of figures below are based. The country is the largest importer on the planet, and the third biggest exporter, with the trading of motor vehicles being both the leading import and export. The US service sector makes up about two-thirds of the total GDP, and it employs about 80% of the 150 million workforce, but the largest net income from any sector derives from manufacturing, with chemical products featuring heavily. The US is the World's largest importer of oil, but also exports the third largest amount of the black stuff too. Aswell as dominating the globe in a financial and political sense, the United States leads the field with production of many commodities including electrical and nuclear energy, liquid natural gas, sulfur, phosphates, salt, corn and soybeans. However this wealth does not stretch to the entire population, because the official US government statistics showed that 37 million people were living in poverty during 2007, with about 11-15% always living in poverty in the World's richest country. The past few decades have left the United States with the greatest income inequality amongst developed nations, and nowadays the top 1% of earners own over a third of the nations wealth, with the top 10% owning almost 70%.

We have chose to include both the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) estimates along with those from the World Bank, and the variations in the two sets of figures can be explained by different testing criteria and techniques by the World's two 'most trusted' financial institutions. The figures below are listed by 'nominal' Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which measures the market value of all goods and services from an entire nation in a given year.