GDP per Capita (PPP)

GDP per capita at purchasing power parity divides a country's output by its population, then corrects for price differences between countries. An international dollar is defined as buying what a dollar buys in the United States: that correction is what makes the comparison honest between an economy where housing and services are cheap and one where they are expensive.

Single source: the IMF World Economic Outlook, PPPPC series, in current international dollars, from 1980 to 2025. "Current" means the figures are not adjusted for inflation — two distant years are therefore not directly comparable; only the relative position of countries within a given year is.

Seven bands, from under $2,000 to $80,000 and above. The top of the ranking is often misleading: financial micro-states and oil emirates divide a very large output by a tiny population. And a high GDP per capita says nothing about distribution — that is what the Gini index is for.

The gap between first and last in this ranking now exceeds a factor of one hundred, against roughly one to thirty in the mid-twentieth century. It is the most widely used indicator for sorting countries into developed, emerging and developing, yet no threshold commands agreement: the World Bank works from gross national income, the IMF from GDP, and the boundaries move every year.