"140 economies (out of 146 with export data from the World Bank in 2010) exported more than the United States when measured as a share of their GDPs"
From the Foreign Policy magazine blog post “Outward Bound: America may be turning inward, but thank goodness the rest of the world isn’t too” by Charles Kenney (here):
.… Four in 10 18-to-24-year-olds in the United States claim to speak a foreign language fluently, but only 14 percent of Americans as a whole know conversational Spanish. Any other language is way behind that.
Unfortunately, chances are that those numbers will go down rather than up in the future. The percentage of U.S. elementary and middle schools offering foreign-language instruction fell between 1997 and 2008 -- from 75 percent to 58 percent in the case of middle schools, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics. On top of that, the number of languages offered also declined. For example, French used to be offered at nearly half of U.S. middle schools in 1997, but was offered at less than a quarter 11 years later. Chinese, as you might imagine, saw big gains (well, relatively): A little more than 2 percent of middle schools offer the language, up from below 1 percent in 1997….
And:
…. And there's a lot of work for America to do out there. While U.S. exports have been climbing, 140 economies (out of 146 with export data from the World Bank in 2010) exported more than the United States when measured as a share of their GDPs. Only Nepal, Brazil, Haiti, Ethiopia, and Tonga did worse than the U.S. export share (13 percent of GDP), according to the World Bank. Afghanistan outdid the United States by 2 percentage points of GDP. And China's export share was more than twice as big, at 30 percent…..
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