The map that shows which companies are worth more than the stock markets of entire countries

It has been a difficult year for stock markets around the world

The map compares big company valuations with the stock markets of some entire countries

Netflix is worth around $40 billion, McDonald's is worth $109 billion and Google and Amazon combined are worth $747 biliion.

You may already know that these companies are worth billions, but it can be hard to give context to such big sums.

But Bank of America Merrill Lynch has come up with a solution to illustrate exactly what the value of some companies looks like, by comparing big company valuations with the stock markets of some countries.

Adobe is valued at $42 billion, almost as much as Poland's stock market. Intel is worth the same as Mexico's stock market. Meanwhile PayPal is worth as much as all the stocks in Turkey.

(Statista (Statista)

Most of these companies are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which makes NYSE multiples more than the value of many of the other exchanges around the world.

It has been a difficult year for stock market investors around the world as many, panicked by reports of slowing economic growth in China, sold off stocks and took their money out of US funds.

In the first week of the year, the S&P Dow Jones family of indices calculated that $2.3 trillion had been wiped off the value of companies around the world.

The FTSE 100, an index of the 100 biggest companies in the UK, briefly slipped into a bear market in January, defined as a long period of falling prices of stocks.

Last summer, the Shanghai Composite, China's benchmark stock index, dropped 8.5 per cent in the biggest selloff since 2007, an event known as Black Monday.