Recently, a couple of leading business magazines reported a rather strange comparison. We are told that the revered TATA Group's business turnover ( which is a sum of all the revenues of its affiliates )has actually exceeded Pakistan, the country's total GDP. So really, is it so ? What is the catch, if any? Well, to begin with the attempt to make a comparison of this nature is itself not new. Tim Worstall, in an Opinion expressed in Forbes on 28th June, 2011, made a telling point in response to similar reports in a magazine called Business Insider, which compared EXXON's turnover of $ 30 Billlion & Thailand's GDP of $37 Billion Worstall argued instead that EXXON's $ 50 Billion revenues (including the profits + salary & wage bill) should be compared not with Thailand (with approx 45 million workforce but with Luxembourg's GDP of $ 54 Billion for the simple reason that 0.2 mill employees at EXXON equal Luxembourg's work force. GDP is the sum total of goods & services produced. (In India GDP is the sum total of Consumption, Exports, Investment and Government spending). Therefore a direct comparison with a business entity's revenues is always problematic and therefore adding the salary & wage bill makes the comparison a bit realistic. Hence, the comparison of a country's GDP with a top-line revenues of a business can make sense if and only if the Business Group's Employees are more or less equal to working population of the country. Also since Luxembourg is a rich-world country the comparison with EXXON a US based country is more apt.
Whereas the TATA group's $ 365 Billion revenues cannot be compared with Pakistan's $ 341 Billion GDP mainly due to the mismatch in workforce [67 million work force (2021 figures) in Pakistan compared to 1.02 million employed by the house of TATA's]. That India's GDP is 10 times that of Pakistan may also be a factor.
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