Key takeaways
The U.S. Latino GDP reached $3.7 trillion in 2022, the highest mark since the figure was first tracked — and the fifth-largest GDP in the world — a new report by UCLA and Cal Lutheran shows.
During the COVID-19 years from 2019 to 2022, the U.S. Latino GDP grew faster than the GDP of any of the world’s top 10 economies, including China and India.
When compared with the GDPs of the world’s largest economies, the U.S. Latino GDP has been the third-fastest-growing overall since 2010.
While Latinos faced high death rates from COVID-19, their “healthy lifestyle advantage,” including greater life expectancy than non-Hispanic whites, has rebounded.
Latinos helped prop up the U.S. economy during the most challenging days of the COVID-19 pandemic and then spearheaded the nation’s economic recovery, according to the latest U.S. Latino GDP report, released by researchers from UCLA and California Lutheran University.
The total economic output, or gross domestic product, of Latinos in the U.S. reached $3.7 trillion in 2022, the researchers found, exceeding the historic $3.2 trillion mark set in 2021. The latest figure would make the U.S. Latino GDP the fifth largest GDP in the world for 2022 — greater than India, the United Kingdom and France.
Since its inaugural release in 2017, the report, which is currently produced annually by the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture and Cal Lutheran’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting, has provided a detailed view of the large and rapidly growing economic contributions of Latinos living in the United States. UCLA’s David Hayes-Bautista, who co-founded the U.S. Latino GDP Project and the report series, first began the effort to track information on the Latino GDP in 2004.
The new findings show a continued upward trend in the economic performance of Latinos in the U.S, with their GDP rising from $1.6 trillion in 2010 to $2.8 trillion in 2019 before topping $3 trillion for the first time in 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When COVID-19 struck, many analysts predicted that earlier Latino economic gains would be erased,” said David Hayes-Bautista, a distinguished professor of medicine at UCLA and co-author of the report. “But the U.S. Latino GDP has continued to roar on.”
During the pandemic years of 2019 to 2022, the average annual growth of real U.S. Latino GDP was 4.8%, compared with just 1.5% for the broader U.S. economy, the researchers found. Over that same period, Latinos were responsible for 41.4% of the growth in real U.S. GDP, despite comprising just 19.2% of the U.S. population.
“When COVID-19 struck, many analysts predicted that earlier Latino economic gains would be erased,” said David Hayes-Bautista, a distinguished professor of medicine at UCLA and co-author of the report. “But the U.S. Latino GDP has continued to roar on.”
In fact, the performance of Latinos during the pandemic was sufficient to make the U.S. Latino GDP the fastest-growing GDP among the world’s top 10 economies from 2019 to 2022, outpacing the GDP growth of economic powerhouses like China, India and the U.S. as a whole, which came a distant fourth.
“Examining the impacts of COVID-19 on the U.S. economy through the lens of the Latino GDP is very revealing,” said Matthew Fienup, executive director of the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting at Cal Lutheran and co-author of the report. “We believe that the economic data published in this year’s U.S. Latino GDP report illustrate just how vital Latino strength and resilience are for the nation’s economy.”
Over an even greater timespan, from 2010 to 2022, Latinos have shown that they are a major driver of economic growth in the U.S. During that period, the U.S. Latino GDP was the third-fastest-growing among the 10 largest GDPs in the world. And over that same period, the average annual growth of real U.S. Latino GDP was 4.2 percent, compared to only 1.7 percent for the broader U.S. economy.
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