US vs. Mexico economic/development parity

[agentsteel53]

I am looking for a graph.  I seem to remember reading/hearing somewhere, many years ago, that the US and Mexico were at comparable levels of development well into the 1940s, before the two diverged.

does anyone have a graph illustrating this?  I'd be happy with any criterion of measurement: GDP per capita, purchasing power, human development index, etc. - just to either confirm or contradict my recollection.

Google is no help, alas, because I am getting only recent indicators, as opposed to those measured over time. 

I figured this forum is filled with a variety of intelligent people, at least one of whom may be able to help me out.  anyone?

[jwolfer]

Have you checked the CIA factbook.  They have stats for all the countries of the workd but I am not sure if they have historical stats

[realjd]

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gdp+of+mexico+vs+gdp+of+united+states

Goes back to 1961.

EDIT: It defaults to a logarithmic scale but there's a button to turn the chart into a linear scale.

[agentsteel53]

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gdp+of+mexico+vs+gdp+of+united+states

Goes back to 1961.

EDIT: It defaults to a logarithmic scale but there's a button to turn the chart into a linear scale.

thanks!

looks like by 1961 there was already a great disparity that was more significant than can be explained by normalizing to per-capita. 

[J N Winkler]

I don't think the US and Mexico have been close to parity by any standard-of-living measure at any point in their histories, though the position is complicated by income distribution, which in Mexico has a geographical dimension because a lot of Mexico's poor are peasants (many of whom do not even speak Spanish) in mountain villages which are more or less cut off from the transportation infrastructure.  There were probably times in the respective countries' histories (say the 1930's) when one could walk out into cities in Mexico and America and not see a great deal of visible difference in terms of standard of living.

[agentsteel53]

I don't think the US and Mexico have been close to parity by any standard-of-living measure at any point in their histories, though the position is complicated by income distribution, which in Mexico has a geographical dimension because a lot of Mexico's poor are peasants (many of whom do not even speak Spanish) in mountain villages which are more or less cut off from the transportation infrastructure.  There were probably times in the respective countries' histories (say the 1930's) when one could walk out into cities in Mexico and America and not see a great deal of visible difference in terms of standard of living.

that 1930s data point is probably what I remember.  so, basically you wouldn't see much difference between El Paso and Juarez, circa 1935?

[J N Winkler]

that 1930s data point is probably what I remember.  so, basically you wouldn't see much difference between El Paso and Juarez, circa 1935?

Yeah, that is what I would expect.  Compare Dorothea Lange's photographs from the north side of the border with the film adaptation of Treasure of the Sierra Madre (filmed in the late 1940's but based on a novel set partly in Tampico in the mid-1930's, just before Cárdenas' oil confiscation):  those are the images that come to mind for me.