Case Assignment: Top 20 Richest Countries in the World Based on GDP Per Capita

    Case Assignment       By: [student’s name]     [University] [date]     Case Assignment             There are two ways to determine how rich a country is (World Bank, 2016). The first utilizes the GDP per capita measures national income vis-à-vis the number of individuals in the country. Through the GDP per capita, institutions can determine how rich the average resident of a country is (Pasquali, 2015), assuming that the income is equally distributed. The second measure is the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which looks at the living standards in a country. While most economists prefer to use PPP to determine the real effect of economic growth on the citizens of the country, institutions like World Bank use the GDP per capita because it is quantitative and the data used to compute for it is readily available through a country’s statistical offices. Unlike the PPP, the GDP per capita looks only at the exchange rates in order to compare one country from another whereas PPP looks at “relative cost of living and inflation rates” (Pasquali, 2015) by through a standard basket of goods typically purchased in the countries. Needless to say, the standard basket change from country to country and so, adds an element of subjectivity in the computation for the country’s wealth, whereas the GDP per capita is relatively straightforward – it takes the country’s total annual income and divide it by the country’s population. For this paper, data on GDP per capita will be collected from the World Bank and used to make the comparison per country. Table 1 below summarizes the GDP per capita of the top 20 richest countries in the world. To get the range for this data set, one has to deduct the lowest GDP per capita from that of the highest. Using this formula, the range is: 61,011.6 which is actually very large, considering the richest country’s GDP per capita is only 101, 450.   Table 2: Top 20 Richest Countries in the World Based on GDP Per Capita

Rank	Country	GDP per capita (in million USD)
1	Luxembourg	101,450
2	Switzerland	80,214.7
3	Macao SAR, China	78,585.9
4	Norway	74,734.6
5	Qatar	74,667.2
6	Australia	56,327.7
7	United States	55,836.8
8	Singapore	52,888.7
9	Denmark	52,002.2
10	Ireland	51,289.7
11	Sweden	50,272.9
12	Iceland	50,173.3
13	Netherlands	44,433.4
14	United Kingdom	43,734
15	Austria	43,438.9
16	Canada	43,248.5
17	HongKong SAR, China	42,422.9
18	Finland	41,920.8
19	Germany	41,219
20	United Arab Emirates	40,438.4

  To better understand the data, the average, median and mode were also comput...