GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per Person
GDP / Population
The Goal of Analysis based on GDP per Capita is about understanding why differences in GDP in countries occur and how they change. Based on these insights one hopes to correlate to e.g. Human Development Index or other measurements.
Problems
- Unpaid work, shadow economy
- home-grown vegetables
- cooking (private households)
- cyber crime
- correlation of cash-circulation to estimate shadow economy
- crime (up to 25% in poor and large countries)
- bartering (presumably too insignificant to matter)
- distribution of income
- accounting for exchange rates
- accounting for level differences (Purchasing Power)
What it is not
- a free-for-all comparison tool for all countries
- a perfect measurement
- a measurement for human development
- a measurement for happiness and satisfaction
- people in countries with more sun are happier on average
- a measurement for life expectancy
No GDP?
Data Points:
- 0 North Korea (not a single data point)
- 0 Somalia (political instability)
- 1 South Sudan (political instability)
Almost no data points
- Afghanistan (at the moment)
- Western Sahara (difficult but possible)
Purchasing Power
The purchasing power of 1, lets say, US Dollar is different in each country. Therefore the same amount of money will get different amounts of products.
GDP per Capital adjusted for purchasing power or Purchasing Power Parity is a much more accurate way of measuring the actual GDP per Capita for comparing different countries.
The Dataset is called the Penn World Table