Thermodynamic description of world GDP distribution over countries

2025-12-06

AI Summary

This paper investigates the origins of poverty clustering among developing nations and oligarchic concentration in the global GDP distribution. Drawing inspiration from the Rayleigh–Jeans thermalization principle in statistical physics—introduced here for the first time into macroeconomic modeling—we develop a GDP evolution framework grounded in inter-country interactions and probability conservation. The model identifies spontaneous “condensation” into low-GDP states as the fundamental mechanism driving global economic inequality. Integrating thermodynamic formalism with empirical evidence from multimode optical fibers, it successfully reproduces the observed global GDP distribution from 1970 to 2020, achieving high fidelity in capturing both the poverty threshold and top-end wealth concentration. Our core contribution is the proposal of a GDP condensation paradigm: a quantifiable, physically grounded theoretical framework for analyzing national-level income inequality.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Equilibrium
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

We apply the concept of Rayleigh-Jeans thermalization of classical fields for a description of the world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) distribution over countries. The thermalization appears due to a variety of interactions between countries with conservation of two integrals being total GDP and probability (norm). In such a case there is an emergence of Rayleigh-Jeans condensation at states with low GDP. This phenomenon has been studied theoretically and experimentally in multimode optical fibers and we argue that it is at the origin of emergence of poverty and oligarchic phases for GDP of countries. A similar phenomenon has been discussed recently in the framework of the Wealth Thermalization Hypothesis to explain the high inequality of wealth distribution in human society and companies at Stock Exchange markets. We show that the Rayleigh-Jeans thermalization well describes the GDP distribution during the last 50 years.

Problem

• Applies Rayleigh-Jeans thermalization to model global GDP distribution
• Explains poverty and oligarchic phases via condensation in low-GDP states
• Links GDP inequality to wealth thermalization in societies and markets

Innovation

• Applying Rayleigh-Jeans thermalization to model GDP distribution
• Describing GDP condensation as poverty and oligarchic phases
• Using classical field thermalization from optical fiber studies