The Latino Donor Collaborative (LDC), a non-partisan national organization focused on “advancing a more accurate portrayal of Latinos,” released a study that measured the community’s economic power by calculating the strength of its workforce and the Latino Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as of 2015. The report, titled “Latino Gross Domestic Product Report: Quantifying the Impact of American Hispanic Economic Growth,” was published on June 28.
“The common perception of Latinos being a burden to U.S. society is utterly wrong,” Schink and Hayes-Bautista wrote in the report. “To the contrary, Latinos are the element most needed to fuel the growth of this country. All Americans have benefitted from the $2.13 trillion contribution the Latino GDP makes to the country, and should take steps to make sure it continues.”
According to the study, the Latino community’s more than $2.13 trillion GDP surpasses the GDP of India, Italy, Brazil and Canada. That means if the more than 56 million Latinos living in the U.S. were an autonomous country, they’d have the seventh largest GDP in the world.
If the population were its own U.S. state, it’d have the second-largest GDP in the country after California.
The LDC’s Latino GDP figure is far higher than what the University of Georgia’s Selig Center for Economic Growth calculated in 2015. The Multicultural Economy Report stated that the U.S. Hispanic market’s buying power stood at $1.3 trillion and would reach $1.7 trillion by 2020.
Latinos are America’s new mainstream audience and it is our hope that this study will lead business and political leaders to take us seriously and invest in our continued growth.”
