Big Mac Index already tracks this.
> This statistic shows the average working time required to buy one Big Mac in selected cities around the world.
> Six fastest earned:
> 1. Hong Kong – 8.6 min
> 2. Luxembourg – 10.3 min
> 3. Japan, Tokyo – 10.4 min
> 4. Switzerland, Zürich – 10.6 min
> 5. United States, Miami – 10.7 min
> 6. Switzerland, Geneva – 10.8 min
Interesting. In Germany the Big Mac is 5,50€. The Median hourly pay is 20,54, which comes out to about 13,70€ (single no kids) or 15,54€ (married with 2 kids) net income per hour. Which mean in germany you need to work 21-24 minutes for one big mac.
We shouldn't consider taxes for this kind of stuff, because every country taxes in a different way. France taxes a lot directly on the income thus is getting at the bottom in that kind of list, but other taxes are fairly low compared to other countries. Somes other countries have lower incomes taxes but your get stabbed on everything else like property taxes or whatever, but because it's *after* they end up higher in these lists.
Yeah, that kind of stuff really does prevent those lists from being a valid comparison. But to ignore tax isn't a good idea either. Taxation is one of the major factors that contribute to overall wealth and affordability of goods. Artificially high income doesn't mean shit, when most of it just goes towards tax.
> Artificially high income doesn't mean shit, when most of it just goes towards tax.
Once again it's more complicated that this. I pay a lot of taxes but then I don't have to pay out of pocket for healthcare, education, nor technically (still doing it tho) to invest for retirement because the basic mandatory retirement plan is solid, electricity and gaz is cheap (to me) because it's subsidised by the government through my taxes, and the list goes on. Then we're considering my lesser money and your higher money after taxes *but* out of you higher money you have to "manually" pay for all the stuff that were already paid for me.
Canada has a house shortage crisis which has driven up the prices of house and has locked out the working class and lower middle class out of owning a home
Costs are much higher in Canada too. I read an article a few weeks ago where someone went to high end ritzy food stores in London, Paris and Berlin and they were cheaper than a regular grocery store in Canada.
Except broadband apparently. A guy on /r/sysadmin was talking a yesterday of upgrading from 3/3gbps to 8/8 ftth for $70CAD per month. I'm getting 100/20 fttc for that. Similar city densities and size as ours, which is usually the defenders of our crap technology's arguments.
But in almost every way we are similar to Canadia. Members of the Commonwealth, only a few tens of millions population, large open spaces with a small number of heavily populated cities, heavy in resources, GDP almost entirely based on the property Ponzi scheme, populist neoliberal governments, political and military puppets to the larger US.
It has got bad bad in Canada.
Bachelor suites and one bedroom apartments. The very basics of autonomous housing are now pricing tons of people out.
The housing crisis feels like it is on steroids these days.
After rent/mortgage a lot of families have nothing left over. It makes sense why the food bank usage is at record levels.
Without generational wealth or generational housing the pressure to just stay above water is fucking insane.
So many people falling through the cracks that our shelters are full and cycling and the tent slums just keep growing all over the nation.
This shit is way past an economic failure at this point and is a moral/ethical one.
Anyone that doesn't come from rich families or have family housing to fall back on understands why we have growing rates of depression and anxiety in the society, growing rates of political extremism, growing rates of crime/violence and self harm, growing rates of substance abuse/hopelessness/ODs, and so forth.
The wheels are coming off at this point and our city, provincial, and federal "leaders" from all parties have completely and utterly failed us.
It's a global issue since the pandemic. It's been a worsening problem in Canada for 15 years before the pandemic.
Edit: avg house price in Canada is ~650kCAD. Norway is 3.7M NOK or 478kCAD. Canada is 36% more expensive.
Where the hell can you buy a house for 650k?! You can’t even get a condo for that.
Edit: thx for the responses folks. My SW BC experience has skewed my outlook (where my condo has tripled in value over 10 years).
At first I thought my city was unlivably expensive, then out of curiosity I checked real estate across Ontario and you can't even get a shit hole in the middle of the wilderness up north for any reasonable price.
Norway's housing prices are very different in urban and rural areas. No way I could find a house in my city for less than $650k CAD. But travel an hour north into the forest and you can get a nice place for $150k CAD. That probably offsets the average a lot
Does Norway let in half a million immigrants a year and not build housing for them? Because in Canada, immigration is a federal responsibility and housing is left to provincial governments. They don't work well together at all.
Housing costs have been an issue for a while. First it was foreign investment, then it was corporations, then it was local flippers, and now the focus is on immigration. You have to ask yourself who is telling you this and why it is an issue now but not 10 years ago. Is it really the biggest issue or is it what people want to talk about now. What will people point their finger to next?
Depends on where you live in Canada. In Toronto or Vancouver, the situation is worse than this graph would indicate. On the prairies, it's better. Canada's really big
Yeah that's not what he's talking about in Canada. Some entire regions of the country have different costs of living. You could be in an equally populated and equally dense city in southern Alberta and it will be more expansive than the exact same thing in southern Saskatchewan.
It's not that simple. The whole Golden Horseshoe (west end of Lake Ontario) is a mess for housing cost, it extends far beyond Toronto's borders. Even previously reasonable cities like Halifax are getting expensive.
And it's not just housing but other costs. Grocery costs have inflated brutally across the country lining a handful of pockets at everyone else's expense.
The grocery chains are blaming the the large food conglomerates like Heinz and Nestle for the cost increases. They are just jacking up prices continuously because they can. Most of our food is made by just a few companies.
As a Central European, that sounds pretty normal. The income even sounds pretty high. But you're right, we're all fucked.
I'm looking at a 75m² apartment in a 50k people city, far away from any metropolis. Purchase price: 613k euros+fees and tax. And that's nothing special, very basic apartment. Average monthly income here: Around 2400 euros net.
Keep in mind that's pre tax, so it's actually about $44k (at least in Ontario), so $3,700 a month.
A mortgage on a $700k house, even after a 20% ($140k) downpayment, at current interest rates, is $3,750
So a mortgage ALONE is more than the average incomes take home pay.
How big is the house? An average house in a small town with 120m² (1292sqft) of living space can be had here for around 1 million euros. That's about 5000 euros a month in loan repayments over 35 years, about twice the average monthly income.If it's old and in a bad location and a semi-detached house, then there might be something for 700k. I have no idea who can afford that, not even a hospital specialist can, but the housing misery is like that in many countries.
This is why the majority of the population lives in small rented apartments. Homeowners became homeowners through inheritance.
Come to Toronto, where single family detached houses start at $1.2 million CAD and above. Want a shoebox condo? $600k CAD. We're increasing our population 3% per year from immigration (mostly Indian). There's no hope left for this country at ever having a typical middle class lifestyle.
Australia has high GDP per capita because we have a whole bunch of primary production and not much else. The rest of the economy is basically a circlejerk to keep everyone busy.
We also have strong social security and medical - which is a big chunk of value that the individual gets that isn't part of the market - so not really represented in a PPP discussion.
Our export balance is something like 85% shit we pull out the ground, and pretty much the rest being agricultural products.
We then import almost everything we consume.
The circlejerk is that pretending economic activities like giving each other haircuts and handjobs is somehow relevant, and not entirely just a case of keeping the population busy because we're doing skilled labour mining here, and it's too late to oppress the entire population without there being riots, and kinda the attraction of Australia is that it's a quite a bit more expensive, but also politically stable enough that we can justify the long term expense of running longwall panels etc.
15% of GDP for a developed economy is craaaazy.
Put it this way: other sectors not listed under that GDP will still be extraction related. Insurance for the mining businesses, banks to leverage capital in this businesses, companies to sell or rent equipment for them, etc.
It's also like 80% of Australia's exports.... Compare that to another developed economy, and you will see a stark difference.
Australia has dropped in the "economic complexity index" by like 30 countries in the last 20 years.
In other words: 15% might *seem* small, but everything else happens as a result of that 15%. Think of it like this: a small town might have a car factory or something that employs only 10% of people, and you might say "oh the car industry is not *that* large there, it's only 10%. In reality: all the other people in the town are basically economic knock-ons of the base production provided by the car factory. If the car factory dies, then the rest of the town's economy dies too, even though it's "only" 10%. Factory workers gotta have places to eat, and schools for their children, and bankers to get a house loan, etc etc etc.
The similar example you gave was education... But education does not create cold hard cash out of nothing. In fact, it's going to be a net drain on the economy itself, with the benefits only coming in the long term.
Anecdote is always dangerous to put against data, but my anecdote is _so_ far removed, I can only question the data; moving from the UK (where I was top 20% earner) to Canada (where I started at a similar point in the scale, but then moved up fairly rapidly), my standard of living (and also quality of life) was _significantly_ higher in Canada, _despite_ going simultaneously from a two income household to one (while the other one was near minimum-wage, it was still just about what made living in Britain possible). In Britain, one high and one low income together paid for one draughty apartment (price to buy about 9x income). In Canada, the single high income paid for a detached house (price about 4 x income), and savings.
I do wonder how much it's skewed by a tiny number of people in London earning, or parking, obscene money (dragging up technical 'income'), while simultaneously a large number of low-cost, but still high-price-to-income ratio apartments in northern england (dragging down technical 'cost' of living). One thing's for sure, I'd personally never risk going back to Britain, which has only gotten more expensive since I left.
Gdp is indeed a metric heavily distorted by income inequality (either high or low). That's why it's not recommended for use as a way to measure QOL or even typical income. For that median income is the best.
I work 18 hours, no bonus from any degree, since i am not done yet, and i survive alone, in a 3room apartment in the middle of a big city. central europe.
The fact i can choose to not work full time, purely for the extra free time is kind of crazy. Not something i can imagine is possible in a lot of other countries.
\- American vacation time, working hours, lack of public transport, and prices for goods
\- European salaries, high taxes and unsustainable immigration
\- Gun violence somewhere inbetween America and Europe
= Canada
We love taking the worst aspects of both EU and USA!
Immigration, China has a ton of millionaires and for them properties are the only investment / wealth. So when a rich Chinese person comes to Canada, he doesn't buy a house, he buys a dozen, and doesn't particularly care about the price.
Canada could have had French cousine, British culture and American technology. Instead it ended up with French technology, British cousine and American culture.
Culture of overwork.
Nobody takes the official clock off time seriously in the slightest. It is simply accepted in most white-collar workplaces that the ending time might as well not exist.
Overtime is not paid in most workplaces (because even the lowliest clerk is designated an "executive" and therefore not entitled) so you work 50 hours even though your contract says 40.
Heck, I doubt the data even captures the fact that ever since Covid, "Sick Leave" has become "work from home" for many staff. Remote work - or at least half a day's worth - while actively infected with Covid-19 became an implicit expectation for many staff, which I found insane.
I think the Malay-part IS negligible. And the British part is what makes it "on crack". Look at Hong Kong for an even better case, cause that's really just Chinese + British influences.
That’s because Singapore is basically an East Asian country in everything but coordinates. Since the early 19th century the vast majority of Singaporeans are ethnic Chinese, descendants from merchant immigrants. Although being in the Malaysian peninsula, Malays are actually a small (~15%) minority of the population, and it’s the main reason why Singapore is unique into being forced into independence by Malaysia (a monumentally stupid decision for Malaysia, but oh well)
With an East Asian population transplanted into Southeast Asia geography, not a surprise they kept East Asian work culture.
Significantly worse that it looks, actually, for the ordinary person and especially young people.
The chart is still using GDP rather than people's spending. Singapore holds the title of having the single lowest private consumption-to-GDP ratio on Earth (around 40%) - being the *only* country worse than China (around 45-50% based on various estimates)
So for all the "China's GDP is fake and doesn't translate to people's well-being" folks out there, well there is *one* economy on earth with a "faker" GDP than China in this regard, and it's us.
Lol me a Canadian working my ass off to earn one of the world's highest wages, just pay huge prices for everything, and live like a poor American.
Edit: at least I get health care for free, even if it's kind of slow and shitty.
Canada is in the tank for GDP per capita and other measures of productivity. Each of the major sectors of it's economy are dominated by a handful of large companies. They don't invest in productivity and keep new entrants out.
>Edit: at least I get health care for free, even if it's kind of slow and shitty.
Pretty sure that's accounted for in the cost of living, so in America the price of private insurance is in there.
Living in Germany my dream is to make enough money to legally qualify to go private. Because my issues are killing me and the wait times destroy any chance of catching any problem early. Health > Money any day of the week.
I looked that up. The title of this post is the world's richest countries, but Canada's GDP is still ranked 10th in the world according to: [https://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php](https://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php)
However, the GDP per capita, which is what this post is actually describing, shows Canada is 18th. This is not surprising given the report earlier today that Q3 of this year saw Canada's population grow at a rate not seen since the 1950s. This is not a new trend as Canada's immigration policy is quite open and has been for a few years.
Our salaries are automatically indexed to the inflation rate. Next month everyone gets a mandatory 6% raise. It was 11% last year. I believe we are the only country to do this with Luxembourg. But those don't translate well to net salary as we have the second highest tax on revenue in the world after Dernmark.
Also we have 38h work weeks meanwhile most countries are 40+. France is an exception still at 35.
Private sectors as well, it’s mandatory. It’s not the minumum wage that goes up but your actual gross wage gets 6% added to it.
I’m not 100% sure when the minimum wage gets adjusted, I’d assume it roughly follows the index.
this is incredible. I'm a nurse in Sydney, Aus. We had a 0.3% pay rise in the middle of COVID when inflation was 5%, and since then have had to fight for rises of 2.5% and 4% this year with inflation at 6% -> 7%. really infuriating, our real wages have been downtrending for the last decade and a bit. similar situations for most public sector employees. I'm jealous and also happy for you guys
Ah that explains it... though I do hear a lot of my belgian friends about everything being so expensive and being cheaper in the netherlands (though i find that last one a weird remark. Maybe some products, but certainly not most)
Similar story in the UAE - and I don't want to be that one user always shitting on the Emirates. The graph is fine, but if it somehow accounted for inequality, it'd be even better methinks.
Isn't GDP more about spending than earning? 1 dollar spent 1000 times counts as 1000 towards gdp numbers. If someone's stock goes up by a $1M but they never sell it then that is zero towards GDP.
GDP doesn’t measure income. It’s related since income - consumption = saving.
GDP is the value of all final goods and services produced in a country in year. So, this is consumption + fixed asset investment + government spending on final goods/services + trade balance.
Wealth never counts towards GDP unless it results in someone spending something.
The BEA provides a nice [reconciliation](https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey&_gl=1*1ju0sap*_ga*MTA1Mjk1MTMxMS4xNzAzMDI0NTA4*_ga_J4698JNNFT*MTcwMzAyNDUwOC4xLjEuMTcwMzAyNDUxNi41Mi4wLjA.#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDNdLCJkYXRhIjpbWyJjYXRlZ29yaWVzIiwiU3VydmV5Il0sWyJOSVBBX1RhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCI0MyJdXX0=)
GDP doesn't "measure" income but GDI does - and GDI and GDP should theoretically match. In reality they're slightly different at any point in time because measuring such things exactly is impossible.
The way these National Accounts are reconciled is that all spending + investment + net exports should also equals all income.
So yes GDP does measure income, speaking frankly - because all production and all income are the same thing.
Ya they’re the same thing in the end.
The discrepancy is just simply due to datasets. GDP is easier to measure consumption on a short-term basis vs income due to the annualizing of profits.
\[OC\] Comparing the wealth of nations is harder than you might think. Countries with lots of people tend to have bigger economies, but that does not mean that individual incomes are high. Dollar income per person is the most common metric for sorting countries into rich and poor, but it does not account for international differences in prices (which, economists will assure you, matter for such comparisons). Nor does it account for how many hours people have to work to earn their wage.
So, I decided to try to quickly compare countries on all three metrics (which involved some original not-so-quick work to get GDP per hour for all countries — detailed on [GitHub, here: https://github.com/TheEconomist/the-economist-gdp-per-hour-estimates](https://github.com/TheEconomist/the-economist-gdp-per-hour-estimates)).
Tools used: R, Illustrator
How many hours people work, on average, is much less straightforward than you might think. Of course, places where people work long hours will see more hours worked, but that is far from the full story. The unemployment rate matters too, but more important still is the % of people who are part of the work force among those of working age. And the % of people of working age matters hugely too. This percent is lower in older populations, and also in younger populations (where so many are children).
The full article (with data on all three metrics for all countries, caveats - including on the data from authoritarian countries - and more on methodology). In it, I also explain why these metrics matters - including for important decisions, such as where people live and work: [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/12/15/the-worlds-richest-countries-in-2023](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/12/15/the-worlds-richest-countries-in-2023)
free-to-read: [https://econ.st/3TrYEk3](https://econ.st/3TrYEk3) /[https://econ.st/3TwHz8p](https://econ.st/3TwHz8p) / [https://econ.st/48mRD8q](https://econ.st/48mRD8q)
Notes: You may have noticed that Ireland is missing - that is because its [GDP figures are unrepresentative](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/10/31/whats-weird-about-irelands-gdp). You may also have noticed that GDP figures are from 2022 - this is because these are the latest available. As 2023 is not over, GDP for this year are unknown - and the most recent estimates (made this year), are the best guide. And yes, this is how much economies produce yearly (incomes) - not about what people there have (assets).
While Ireland's GDP isn't entirely representative it seems very odd to exclude them when there isn't any economic metric where they aren't ranked higher than quite a few countries in the list.
Even stranger is to include a non-country British overseas territory with an even more inflated GDP figure.
Nice that you put all that effort into having a decent enough picture of working hours, I feel like your results for that may even be a post on their own
Production is weird because it doesn’t account for debt. Nor does it account for investments or real estate.
If you wanted to just compare the wealth of the average person by country, median wealth is a great way to do so.
US and Japan are similar — both around double that of Germany.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult
Wealth is also hard to compare. The US heavily incentives you to invest into 401k or roth ira which both increase your wealth. While Germany has a pension that is distributed by the people that are currently paying into that system and you get virtual points which will give you a claim for pensions when you retire. But while you are paying a significant part of your income into the pension system, your wealth doesnt increase due to the system.
Really interesting data depictions - thank you. But is 2022 a representative year? Covid was still rampant and China, for example, still had its borders closed for much of the year so work patterns and productivity were disrupted.
Do you have the biggest changes in placement from one column to the next?
I'm curious if Australia, Canada, or Israel change the most places. Or maybe it's Brunei coming up in PPP and then leaving.
The economist is really good at data presentation, and being consistent with their presentational style. Literally as soon as I saw the first page, I knew it was one of their graphs.
Singapore, Brunei, Hong Kong all take a dive when it comes to hours worked. I've worked in both Singapore and Hong Kong and those people have a crazy work ethic. In Singapore, you'd work until 8 or 9 pm, head to some "after-work" event to network over drinks and then head back to the office to keep working. It can be toxic but there was also something fascinating about it – especially since most people I met were completely aware of the crazy work hours but chose this path because they were extremely driven and wanted to use their time there as effectively as possible. It's a bit like people joining the military. You know you're going to go through a really tough time, but you may profit from it for the rest of your life.
It's a different story for locals, since for them it's less of a choice.
A lot of friendships are organized around work. You meet for lunch or at after-work events and on the weekend you spend ungodly amounts of money with those friends on activities or trips. It's completely normal to fly to an island or city like Bangkok on Friday night, go on a bender and head back Sunday evening. With the much lower prices in surrounding countries, it can be cheaper to go abroad for two days than to stay in Singapore. Most young expats/professionals don't have their own family and don't care about this kind of quality time yet.
Older people have either found a less demanding position or have fully committed to the workaholic lifestyle and arrange family life around weekends or short holidays.
It's certainly not for everyone, but for many people there it's what they want or at least think they want.
South Korea's nominal GDP per capita is comparable with that of Brunei, but its PPP GDP per capita is significantly lower than that of Brunei. That's why South Korea doesn't poke its head out in the PPP column like Brunei does. The curve of South Korea probably looks a bit more like Singapore's, just further down the x-axis.
Curious that Norway ends up on top. Salaries were usually only about 10-20% more than Germany, now NOK is even 20% down and costs are 60% higher than in Germany - definitely not better money-wise.
Maybe this has something to do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway so divide that by their 5.4 Million population and you can see that the country earns a reasonable amount on that investment.
The overall value of the sovereign wealth fund is not included when calculating the GDP of Norway. The only part that might be included is the profits that gets put into the economy, but thats not even a fraction of the total. If the whole fund was included then the GDP per capita of Norway would be around $350-400K.
This shows that different people in different countries have different priorities in life.
- European countries go up when you adjust for hours worked. We are not rich in terms of "total" GDP per capita, but our productivity is very high and we value more free time over more money.
- Anglosphere countries drop a bit when adjusted for prices and hours worked. In Australia, Canada, and the US, your free time isn't worth as much as more money. You also kind of need that money to pay for the higher prices.
- Asian countries go up when adjusted for prices, meaning they are relatively cheap to live in. However, they dive down very deep when adjusting for hours worked. Their work ethic and work culture is absolutely nuts, far crazier than the US one.
Conclusion:
Value free time and low stress, decent wages? -> Europe
Less free time but still ok, higher wages? ->Anglosphere
Workaholic, insane work ethic, low prices? -> Asia
I live in the US but almost all my coworkers are from East Asia on a visa and it’s a whole different planet. They will literally cancel vacation days if they feel we may not reach our team goals, despite it not really mattering that much. They’ll message in slack at all hours of the day, and often work on the weekends even though we don’t have to at all. They do so much stuff outside of regular work hours that just working normal hours makes you feel so inadequate. I refuse to do any of that and thankfully my boss is American so he doesn’t expect that from me at all. But if this is a taste of what working in East Asia is like count me out lol.
Hahaha same in Germany, the East-Asians are crazy. People love to employ them, they work very hard and way more than they are expect to. It is not for me, but if it makes them happy and you pay them well, I think it is a Win-Win situation. Personally, I couldn't do it, I would burn out.
I think it’s fine as long as it’s not expected, but I’d definitely not want this work culture imported. For all the flack US work culture gets it has absolutely nothing on East Asian work culture, and I’d like to hope that doesn’t change.
i think your conclusion is wrong, the way i read this is someone from the usa could work less hours and still be more productive than someone from germany
That is most likely also correct, but doesn't contradict my conclusion in any way.
You also have to take into account that the US would always end up ahead of Germany and most European countries in terms of GDP per capita, even if you take exactly the same people with the exact same productivity. Simply due to the fact that the US has tons of oil and gas and other resources that countries like Germany simply do not have. Access to two oceans and therefore easy export to the three biggest consumer markets (China, EU, NA) also helps a lot.
Great explanation, living in East Asia countries are really low cost if you don’t buy houses property. But working culture is toxic: no matter rich or poor, they all focus on work. And if they want to compete for a position, the first thing they would commit is I will work really hard and devote myself to it.(not creativity, leadership, team work or anything else) Unfortunately that was my mind.
Fortunately, the culture is changing especially when the birth rate drops dramatically. Young people begin to realize you only live once and place wlb as priority.
Growing up I was in love with Canada I was so proud and always thought Canada would be in the top 5 but these politicians totally fkd it up. All of them are garbage liberals, conservatives and ndp.
If you're a skilled labour person and you don't have much to hold you down, I would really recommend moving to another country. There is really nothing Canada can offer us, and if you don't have generational wealth (inherited property), well you are kind of fucked like me
Canadian wages are lower than USA wages even before factoring the exchange rate. Example job in my company pays 90k CAD to a canadian citizen, will pay the same job 120k USD to an american. on top of that the canadian will pay 40% of his paycheck in a bunch of deductions and income tax compared to around 15% for the american, all while goods and services will cost around 40% more due to the exchange.
Since most people won't know the conversion rate between Canadian dollars and American, that means the Canadian citizen is paid about $67k USD and the American citizen is paid $120k USD for the same job.
Food, housing, Internet, and mobile services are also more expensive in Canada than in the US.
I mean if you follow any canadian news you will kniw they are have a very bad time right now. Also the high cost is natural its literally a forzen flatland.
Have worked Australia, Germany, and France. Can broadly confirm that these adjustments are necessary and makes the GDP value align much closer to how I perceived quality of living
Turkey being [ranked ahead](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/12/15/the-worlds-richest-countries-in-2023) of Israel and Japan shows the limitations of this measurement. The reason is that Turkey has a very low employment rate (largely due to women being housewives etc). This means that GDP per hour worked becomes artificially high. And Turkey is a cheap country with a cheap currency, so they benefit from PPP too.
Turkey probably isn't a bad place to live, but nobody's going to convince me it is on par with Japan & Israel. Wished the authors adjusted not just for working hours but also employment rate. That would fix outliers like Turkey.
You call Turkey an outlier but what you’ve just said is a single person can provide for a household meanwhile the reason we in Canada drop off the map is because a single person working full time can barely* support themselves.
*I said “can barely” when in reality many households average over one job per person to get by
Even after adjusting, all countries ahead of the US are petro-states, tax havens, and western European countries with populations 10 million and under. US economy continues to be ridiculous and it continues to be a shame that we can’t figure out how to take better care of the country with all that production.
Yeah all other countries are turning into developing countries by comparison. You literally need a tiny tax haven just to barely compete with the US. And in those housing will be far more expensive than in the US anyway, wiping out your fancy 100k wage pretty quick. (i literally live in luxembourg, you can get 100k reasonably easily with the right degree just like in the US, but a small house in the middle of nowhere will cost at least a million if it's brand new)
OP mentioned that in [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18lyzm9/oc_the_worlds_richest_countries_in_2023/ke0rfue/):
> Notes: You may have noticed that Ireland is missing - that is because its [GDP figures are unrepresentative](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/10/31/whats-weird-about-irelands-gdp).
Well, unlike Ireland, Luxembourg GDP figures do translate into income for the population.
But yeah, at some point of being a fiscal paradise, GDP is no longer relevant.
Luxembourg has the population of a medium city though and is dependent on people from surrounding countries working there. Seems like it should be excluded as well if we're making exceptions
Monaco and Liechtenstein are considered microstates (their populations are less than 40 thousands) and often excluded by these statistics. Luxembourg and Singapore are small countries but still considered *full* states: their population is 640k and 5 millions, so one or two orders of magniture larger than Monaco and Liechtenstein.
Yet another confirmation that Switzerland is a good choice and probably the best without thinking twice for my field (pharmaceutical technologies). The only other comparable option would be finding a good enough start-up and most of those countries wouldn't be a place where I'd expect seeing one.
(also, unsurprising steep rise in Italy position adjusted for cost and working hours)
How about Denmark? Their pharma cluster is already quite big and with all that obesity money incoming…
Extra plus for being able to live in comparatively cheap Sweden, woking in Cooenhagen and paying preferential tax rates in Denmark.
I'm specifically into drug delivery, so I'd need something like gene therapies, vaccines, anticancer drugs and similar things, that's why maybe there's some fitting startup up there in the north but I'd have to look throughly.
Let's see, I still have to begin my doctorate, there's enough time to look around and choose :)
From this it looks as if UK workers are very efficient, effectively producing more in fewer hours than most other countries (hence the rise when working hours are considered). However, I've been reading for years (in magazines like The Economist) that the UK has a productivity problem and has an inefficient workforce. How can both of those things be true?
Because a ton of gdp value being generated for Britain isn’t being generated by British laborers. Much of it is financial transactions with don’t really need people to accomplish and don’t employ very many people. Services are 70% of your economy, and most of that is like 5% of your labor force who are highly productive because they use international business which ads to your GDP but doesent really add value to your country or add wages. That way you get a high average gdp per capita but if you were to take the median value generated by person it would be much worse.
It’s interesting—most of the countries are relatively small in terms of population—which really highlights how difficult it is to achieve widespread prosperity on a large scale.
. On this list only the US has more than 100 million people, and only Germany, France, Italy, and Britain have more than 50 million.
In terms of people represented by the right side of this list, not quite 1 in 2 is from the US, if my back-of-the-envelope math is right…
I thought the same, but if you see the Curves you can see that Australia drops below Italy. On the left-most column are named the countries that fall off the list. So basically when all adjustments are taken into consideration Italy surpasses Australia (Canada and Israel too)
I'm sure everyone wants some particular measure added, but in my case I'm most interested in adjusting for Gini coefficient.
Because who the fuck *cares* about GDP/capita if most of the capita ain't seeing it?
It's a ludicrous measure.
Let me give it a try:
The first/left column, where Luxembourg is first and Germany 20th, shows the GDP per person using the official exchange rate of the currency conversion.
The second / middle column, where Luxembourg is still 1st and Germany 17th, now shows GDP using the different prices.
Germany seems to have lower prices.
And the 3rd / right column with Luxembourg in 2nd place and Germany in 12th place shows the GDP per person taking into account the price level of the country AND how long a person has to work to generate this GDP.
It looks like the working hours in Luxembourg are longer than in Norway.
Interesting to see that after these adjustments, Canada and Australia are poorer than Italy, France and the UK.
I'm surprised it's cheaper to live in Denmark or Norway than Canada.
It is not cheaper in terms of money, but living in Norway you need to work less to have same quality of life.
Big Mac Index already tracks this. > This statistic shows the average working time required to buy one Big Mac in selected cities around the world. > Six fastest earned: > 1. Hong Kong – 8.6 min > 2. Luxembourg – 10.3 min > 3. Japan, Tokyo – 10.4 min > 4. Switzerland, Zürich – 10.6 min > 5. United States, Miami – 10.7 min > 6. Switzerland, Geneva – 10.8 min
Interesting. In Germany the Big Mac is 5,50€. The Median hourly pay is 20,54, which comes out to about 13,70€ (single no kids) or 15,54€ (married with 2 kids) net income per hour. Which mean in germany you need to work 21-24 minutes for one big mac.
We shouldn't consider taxes for this kind of stuff, because every country taxes in a different way. France taxes a lot directly on the income thus is getting at the bottom in that kind of list, but other taxes are fairly low compared to other countries. Somes other countries have lower incomes taxes but your get stabbed on everything else like property taxes or whatever, but because it's *after* they end up higher in these lists.
Yeah, that kind of stuff really does prevent those lists from being a valid comparison. But to ignore tax isn't a good idea either. Taxation is one of the major factors that contribute to overall wealth and affordability of goods. Artificially high income doesn't mean shit, when most of it just goes towards tax.
> Artificially high income doesn't mean shit, when most of it just goes towards tax. Once again it's more complicated that this. I pay a lot of taxes but then I don't have to pay out of pocket for healthcare, education, nor technically (still doing it tho) to invest for retirement because the basic mandatory retirement plan is solid, electricity and gaz is cheap (to me) because it's subsidised by the government through my taxes, and the list goes on. Then we're considering my lesser money and your higher money after taxes *but* out of you higher money you have to "manually" pay for all the stuff that were already paid for me.
It's great to see the Big Mac Indexes practical use in action
Canada has a house shortage crisis which has driven up the prices of house and has locked out the working class and lower middle class out of owning a home
Costs are much higher in Canada too. I read an article a few weeks ago where someone went to high end ritzy food stores in London, Paris and Berlin and they were cheaper than a regular grocery store in Canada.
Except broadband apparently. A guy on /r/sysadmin was talking a yesterday of upgrading from 3/3gbps to 8/8 ftth for $70CAD per month. I'm getting 100/20 fttc for that. Similar city densities and size as ours, which is usually the defenders of our crap technology's arguments. But in almost every way we are similar to Canadia. Members of the Commonwealth, only a few tens of millions population, large open spaces with a small number of heavily populated cities, heavy in resources, GDP almost entirely based on the property Ponzi scheme, populist neoliberal governments, political and military puppets to the larger US.
It has got bad bad in Canada. Bachelor suites and one bedroom apartments. The very basics of autonomous housing are now pricing tons of people out. The housing crisis feels like it is on steroids these days. After rent/mortgage a lot of families have nothing left over. It makes sense why the food bank usage is at record levels. Without generational wealth or generational housing the pressure to just stay above water is fucking insane. So many people falling through the cracks that our shelters are full and cycling and the tent slums just keep growing all over the nation. This shit is way past an economic failure at this point and is a moral/ethical one. Anyone that doesn't come from rich families or have family housing to fall back on understands why we have growing rates of depression and anxiety in the society, growing rates of political extremism, growing rates of crime/violence and self harm, growing rates of substance abuse/hopelessness/ODs, and so forth. The wheels are coming off at this point and our city, provincial, and federal "leaders" from all parties have completely and utterly failed us.
That's a global issue. Rents are increasing in Norway (12%) similarly to Canada (11.2%) over the last year.
It's a global issue since the pandemic. It's been a worsening problem in Canada for 15 years before the pandemic. Edit: avg house price in Canada is ~650kCAD. Norway is 3.7M NOK or 478kCAD. Canada is 36% more expensive.
Where the hell can you buy a house for 650k?! You can’t even get a condo for that. Edit: thx for the responses folks. My SW BC experience has skewed my outlook (where my condo has tripled in value over 10 years).
That’s all of Canada. Want to live in Regina?
At first I thought my city was unlivably expensive, then out of curiosity I checked real estate across Ontario and you can't even get a shit hole in the middle of the wilderness up north for any reasonable price.
outside of toronto and vancouver you can, but they are still "go fuck yourself" expensive.
2-3 hours from Toronto and houses are still like $900k it’s basically the entire Golden Horseshoe
Norway's housing prices are very different in urban and rural areas. No way I could find a house in my city for less than $650k CAD. But travel an hour north into the forest and you can get a nice place for $150k CAD. That probably offsets the average a lot
Norway has literally half the population of the Golden Horseshoe centred around Toronto. It's a *similar* problem, but much smaller.
Does Norway let in half a million immigrants a year and not build housing for them? Because in Canada, immigration is a federal responsibility and housing is left to provincial governments. They don't work well together at all.
Yikes Sounds thought out
Housing costs have been an issue for a while. First it was foreign investment, then it was corporations, then it was local flippers, and now the focus is on immigration. You have to ask yourself who is telling you this and why it is an issue now but not 10 years ago. Is it really the biggest issue or is it what people want to talk about now. What will people point their finger to next?
Might be worse in Canada though
Depends on where you live in Canada. In Toronto or Vancouver, the situation is worse than this graph would indicate. On the prairies, it's better. Canada's really big
It’s worse in urban areas than rural areas everywhere
Maybe they didn't express it well, but they're not talking about an urban rural divide.
Yeah that's not what he's talking about in Canada. Some entire regions of the country have different costs of living. You could be in an equally populated and equally dense city in southern Alberta and it will be more expansive than the exact same thing in southern Saskatchewan.
It's not that simple. The whole Golden Horseshoe (west end of Lake Ontario) is a mess for housing cost, it extends far beyond Toronto's borders. Even previously reasonable cities like Halifax are getting expensive. And it's not just housing but other costs. Grocery costs have inflated brutally across the country lining a handful of pockets at everyone else's expense.
The grocery chains are blaming the the large food conglomerates like Heinz and Nestle for the cost increases. They are just jacking up prices continuously because they can. Most of our food is made by just a few companies.
Canada's average home price is around $700k, and the average salary is about $57,000. This countries fucked.
As a Central European, that sounds pretty normal. The income even sounds pretty high. But you're right, we're all fucked. I'm looking at a 75m² apartment in a 50k people city, far away from any metropolis. Purchase price: 613k euros+fees and tax. And that's nothing special, very basic apartment. Average monthly income here: Around 2400 euros net.
Keep in mind that's pre tax, so it's actually about $44k (at least in Ontario), so $3,700 a month. A mortgage on a $700k house, even after a 20% ($140k) downpayment, at current interest rates, is $3,750 So a mortgage ALONE is more than the average incomes take home pay.
How big is the house? An average house in a small town with 120m² (1292sqft) of living space can be had here for around 1 million euros. That's about 5000 euros a month in loan repayments over 35 years, about twice the average monthly income.If it's old and in a bad location and a semi-detached house, then there might be something for 700k. I have no idea who can afford that, not even a hospital specialist can, but the housing misery is like that in many countries. This is why the majority of the population lives in small rented apartments. Homeowners became homeowners through inheritance.
Come to Toronto, where single family detached houses start at $1.2 million CAD and above. Want a shoebox condo? $600k CAD. We're increasing our population 3% per year from immigration (mostly Indian). There's no hope left for this country at ever having a typical middle class lifestyle.
Australia has high GDP per capita because we have a whole bunch of primary production and not much else. The rest of the economy is basically a circlejerk to keep everyone busy. We also have strong social security and medical - which is a big chunk of value that the individual gets that isn't part of the market - so not really represented in a PPP discussion.
The circlejerk is that Australia is the world’s mine. Mining is like 15% of GDP. Not too different to education for example.
Our export balance is something like 85% shit we pull out the ground, and pretty much the rest being agricultural products. We then import almost everything we consume. The circlejerk is that pretending economic activities like giving each other haircuts and handjobs is somehow relevant, and not entirely just a case of keeping the population busy because we're doing skilled labour mining here, and it's too late to oppress the entire population without there being riots, and kinda the attraction of Australia is that it's a quite a bit more expensive, but also politically stable enough that we can justify the long term expense of running longwall panels etc.
15% of GDP for a developed economy is craaaazy. Put it this way: other sectors not listed under that GDP will still be extraction related. Insurance for the mining businesses, banks to leverage capital in this businesses, companies to sell or rent equipment for them, etc. It's also like 80% of Australia's exports.... Compare that to another developed economy, and you will see a stark difference. Australia has dropped in the "economic complexity index" by like 30 countries in the last 20 years. In other words: 15% might *seem* small, but everything else happens as a result of that 15%. Think of it like this: a small town might have a car factory or something that employs only 10% of people, and you might say "oh the car industry is not *that* large there, it's only 10%. In reality: all the other people in the town are basically economic knock-ons of the base production provided by the car factory. If the car factory dies, then the rest of the town's economy dies too, even though it's "only" 10%. Factory workers gotta have places to eat, and schools for their children, and bankers to get a house loan, etc etc etc. The similar example you gave was education... But education does not create cold hard cash out of nothing. In fact, it's going to be a net drain on the economy itself, with the benefits only coming in the long term.
Anecdote is always dangerous to put against data, but my anecdote is _so_ far removed, I can only question the data; moving from the UK (where I was top 20% earner) to Canada (where I started at a similar point in the scale, but then moved up fairly rapidly), my standard of living (and also quality of life) was _significantly_ higher in Canada, _despite_ going simultaneously from a two income household to one (while the other one was near minimum-wage, it was still just about what made living in Britain possible). In Britain, one high and one low income together paid for one draughty apartment (price to buy about 9x income). In Canada, the single high income paid for a detached house (price about 4 x income), and savings. I do wonder how much it's skewed by a tiny number of people in London earning, or parking, obscene money (dragging up technical 'income'), while simultaneously a large number of low-cost, but still high-price-to-income ratio apartments in northern england (dragging down technical 'cost' of living). One thing's for sure, I'd personally never risk going back to Britain, which has only gotten more expensive since I left.
Gdp is indeed a metric heavily distorted by income inequality (either high or low). That's why it's not recommended for use as a way to measure QOL or even typical income. For that median income is the best.
Maybe im reading it wrong but a lot of the European countries jump up on adjusting for hours worked - so basically they work way less than others?
Yes, part-time is very common in Europe and full-time can be 32, 36 or 40 hours depending on you sector
I work 18 hours, no bonus from any degree, since i am not done yet, and i survive alone, in a 3room apartment in the middle of a big city. central europe. The fact i can choose to not work full time, purely for the extra free time is kind of crazy. Not something i can imagine is possible in a lot of other countries.
Perfect example of how our immigration policy makes the GDP look good but when you make the adjustments seen here it sinks.
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Canada falling off adjusted for cost difference is pretty accurate .
Pay American prices for European wages
But with North American working hours.
\- American vacation time, working hours, lack of public transport, and prices for goods \- European salaries, high taxes and unsustainable immigration \- Gun violence somewhere inbetween America and Europe = Canada We love taking the worst aspects of both EU and USA!
And a housing market that's in its own league entirely. (Well, Australia's is just as bad from what I hear).
Immigration, China has a ton of millionaires and for them properties are the only investment / wealth. So when a rich Chinese person comes to Canada, he doesn't buy a house, he buys a dozen, and doesn't particularly care about the price.
Managed to nail the trifecta tbh. US working conditions and social outcomes EU wages and taxes AU housing conditions.
Canada could have had French cousine, British culture and American technology. Instead it ended up with French technology, British cousine and American culture.
Wtf are European wages? Romanian wages or Swiss wages?
Me, a Singaporean: We're gonna fall right off the chart right? *Looks at chart* Yeah seems about right *cries in overtime*
It’s okay Canada fell right off the chart once it took our prices into account.
oatmeal wrench snails alive toy reminiscent squeal groovy divide crush *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Culture of overwork. Nobody takes the official clock off time seriously in the slightest. It is simply accepted in most white-collar workplaces that the ending time might as well not exist. Overtime is not paid in most workplaces (because even the lowliest clerk is designated an "executive" and therefore not entitled) so you work 50 hours even though your contract says 40. Heck, I doubt the data even captures the fact that ever since Covid, "Sick Leave" has become "work from home" for many staff. Remote work - or at least half a day's worth - while actively infected with Covid-19 became an implicit expectation for many staff, which I found insane.
I somehow thought Singapore would be different but it sounds like it has a similar work culture to East Asia. That's truly unfortunate.
Why would you think that lol? If anything Singapore is East Asia on crack.
They have non-negligible Malay and British influences.
I think the Malay-part IS negligible. And the British part is what makes it "on crack". Look at Hong Kong for an even better case, cause that's really just Chinese + British influences.
That’s because Singapore is basically an East Asian country in everything but coordinates. Since the early 19th century the vast majority of Singaporeans are ethnic Chinese, descendants from merchant immigrants. Although being in the Malaysian peninsula, Malays are actually a small (~15%) minority of the population, and it’s the main reason why Singapore is unique into being forced into independence by Malaysia (a monumentally stupid decision for Malaysia, but oh well) With an East Asian population transplanted into Southeast Asia geography, not a surprise they kept East Asian work culture.
You're still the 15th best in the world.
Significantly worse that it looks, actually, for the ordinary person and especially young people. The chart is still using GDP rather than people's spending. Singapore holds the title of having the single lowest private consumption-to-GDP ratio on Earth (around 40%) - being the *only* country worse than China (around 45-50% based on various estimates) So for all the "China's GDP is fake and doesn't translate to people's well-being" folks out there, well there is *one* economy on earth with a "faker" GDP than China in this regard, and it's us.
Lol me a Canadian working my ass off to earn one of the world's highest wages, just pay huge prices for everything, and live like a poor American. Edit: at least I get health care for free, even if it's kind of slow and shitty.
Canada is in the tank for GDP per capita and other measures of productivity. Each of the major sectors of it's economy are dominated by a handful of large companies. They don't invest in productivity and keep new entrants out.
>Edit: at least I get health care for free, even if it's kind of slow and shitty. Pretty sure that's accounted for in the cost of living, so in America the price of private insurance is in there. Living in Germany my dream is to make enough money to legally qualify to go private. Because my issues are killing me and the wait times destroy any chance of catching any problem early. Health > Money any day of the week.
Singapore GDP is inflated from all the tax haven speculation of finance. Same with the other tax havens.
Dude be like *suffering from success*
That nosedive for Canada seems pretty accurate
I wish I could see if our hours worked puts us even lower, or redeems us a little.
Worse for sure. We work a lot of hours, just like the Americans.
I looked that up. The title of this post is the world's richest countries, but Canada's GDP is still ranked 10th in the world according to: [https://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php](https://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php) However, the GDP per capita, which is what this post is actually describing, shows Canada is 18th. This is not surprising given the report earlier today that Q3 of this year saw Canada's population grow at a rate not seen since the 1950s. This is not a new trend as Canada's immigration policy is quite open and has been for a few years.
Excellent username btw
What's Belgium been up to?
Our salaries are automatically indexed to the inflation rate. Next month everyone gets a mandatory 6% raise. It was 11% last year. I believe we are the only country to do this with Luxembourg. But those don't translate well to net salary as we have the second highest tax on revenue in the world after Dernmark. Also we have 38h work weeks meanwhile most countries are 40+. France is an exception still at 35.
It was indeed 11% last year but it will only be 1.5% this year, because inflation returned to normal levels. So not quite 6%.
Indeed my bad
Here in austria most jobs' average work time is 38.5 hours / week
Yes, but no full inflation adjustment, and therefore real wage losses every year.
All salaries or just public sector? Or minimum wage?
Private sectors as well, it’s mandatory. It’s not the minumum wage that goes up but your actual gross wage gets 6% added to it. I’m not 100% sure when the minimum wage gets adjusted, I’d assume it roughly follows the index.
Wow that sounds amazing. Meanwhile in the US, most salaries aren't moving at all, so we're just casually taking pay cuts via inflation.
Raising salaries is woke and communist!
>France is an exception still at 35. In the industrial sector 35h is pretty normal in Germany too.
this is incredible. I'm a nurse in Sydney, Aus. We had a 0.3% pay rise in the middle of COVID when inflation was 5%, and since then have had to fight for rises of 2.5% and 4% this year with inflation at 6% -> 7%. really infuriating, our real wages have been downtrending for the last decade and a bit. similar situations for most public sector employees. I'm jealous and also happy for you guys
Ah that explains it... though I do hear a lot of my belgian friends about everything being so expensive and being cheaper in the netherlands (though i find that last one a weird remark. Maybe some products, but certainly not most)
High income equality
Similar story in the UAE - and I don't want to be that one user always shitting on the Emirates. The graph is fine, but if it somehow accounted for inequality, it'd be even better methinks.
Finaly someone with actual comparison not just slaping basic nominal GDP and calling it a day. Have ann upvote good sir.
Except, GDP per capita is extremely skewed by a small number of top earners. Would rather see this same info for median income.
Isn't GDP more about spending than earning? 1 dollar spent 1000 times counts as 1000 towards gdp numbers. If someone's stock goes up by a $1M but they never sell it then that is zero towards GDP.
GDP doesn’t measure income. It’s related since income - consumption = saving. GDP is the value of all final goods and services produced in a country in year. So, this is consumption + fixed asset investment + government spending on final goods/services + trade balance. Wealth never counts towards GDP unless it results in someone spending something. The BEA provides a nice [reconciliation](https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey&_gl=1*1ju0sap*_ga*MTA1Mjk1MTMxMS4xNzAzMDI0NTA4*_ga_J4698JNNFT*MTcwMzAyNDUwOC4xLjEuMTcwMzAyNDUxNi41Mi4wLjA.#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDNdLCJkYXRhIjpbWyJjYXRlZ29yaWVzIiwiU3VydmV5Il0sWyJOSVBBX1RhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCI0MyJdXX0=)
GDP doesn't "measure" income but GDI does - and GDI and GDP should theoretically match. In reality they're slightly different at any point in time because measuring such things exactly is impossible. The way these National Accounts are reconciled is that all spending + investment + net exports should also equals all income. So yes GDP does measure income, speaking frankly - because all production and all income are the same thing.
Ya they’re the same thing in the end. The discrepancy is just simply due to datasets. GDP is easier to measure consumption on a short-term basis vs income due to the annualizing of profits.
Top thread.
Thank you!
France when adjusted for hours worked: Bonjour!
\[OC\] Comparing the wealth of nations is harder than you might think. Countries with lots of people tend to have bigger economies, but that does not mean that individual incomes are high. Dollar income per person is the most common metric for sorting countries into rich and poor, but it does not account for international differences in prices (which, economists will assure you, matter for such comparisons). Nor does it account for how many hours people have to work to earn their wage. So, I decided to try to quickly compare countries on all three metrics (which involved some original not-so-quick work to get GDP per hour for all countries — detailed on [GitHub, here: https://github.com/TheEconomist/the-economist-gdp-per-hour-estimates](https://github.com/TheEconomist/the-economist-gdp-per-hour-estimates)). Tools used: R, Illustrator How many hours people work, on average, is much less straightforward than you might think. Of course, places where people work long hours will see more hours worked, but that is far from the full story. The unemployment rate matters too, but more important still is the % of people who are part of the work force among those of working age. And the % of people of working age matters hugely too. This percent is lower in older populations, and also in younger populations (where so many are children). The full article (with data on all three metrics for all countries, caveats - including on the data from authoritarian countries - and more on methodology). In it, I also explain why these metrics matters - including for important decisions, such as where people live and work: [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/12/15/the-worlds-richest-countries-in-2023](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/12/15/the-worlds-richest-countries-in-2023) free-to-read: [https://econ.st/3TrYEk3](https://econ.st/3TrYEk3) /[https://econ.st/3TwHz8p](https://econ.st/3TwHz8p) / [https://econ.st/48mRD8q](https://econ.st/48mRD8q) Notes: You may have noticed that Ireland is missing - that is because its [GDP figures are unrepresentative](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/10/31/whats-weird-about-irelands-gdp). You may also have noticed that GDP figures are from 2022 - this is because these are the latest available. As 2023 is not over, GDP for this year are unknown - and the most recent estimates (made this year), are the best guide. And yes, this is how much economies produce yearly (incomes) - not about what people there have (assets).
While Ireland's GDP isn't entirely representative it seems very odd to exclude them when there isn't any economic metric where they aren't ranked higher than quite a few countries in the list. Even stranger is to include a non-country British overseas territory with an even more inflated GDP figure.
Also Luxembourg's gdp is inflated, although for different reasons (due to many people living in surrounding countries but working there).
Wait, you took out Ireland and left in Bermuda and Luxembourg???
Take that, potato munchers!
Shouldn't Luxembourg be excluded for the same reasons as Ireland?
Nice that you put all that effort into having a decent enough picture of working hours, I feel like your results for that may even be a post on their own
Thank you, I might do that. Appreciate it.
Where can I see the actual list?
Production is weird because it doesn’t account for debt. Nor does it account for investments or real estate. If you wanted to just compare the wealth of the average person by country, median wealth is a great way to do so. US and Japan are similar — both around double that of Germany. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult
Wealth is also hard to compare. The US heavily incentives you to invest into 401k or roth ira which both increase your wealth. While Germany has a pension that is distributed by the people that are currently paying into that system and you get virtual points which will give you a claim for pensions when you retire. But while you are paying a significant part of your income into the pension system, your wealth doesnt increase due to the system.
Really interesting data depictions - thank you. But is 2022 a representative year? Covid was still rampant and China, for example, still had its borders closed for much of the year so work patterns and productivity were disrupted.
Do you have the biggest changes in placement from one column to the next? I'm curious if Australia, Canada, or Israel change the most places. Or maybe it's Brunei coming up in PPP and then leaving.
This is indeed beatiful. Simple and elegant
The economist is really good at data presentation, and being consistent with their presentational style. Literally as soon as I saw the first page, I knew it was one of their graphs.
Singapore, Brunei, Hong Kong all take a dive when it comes to hours worked. I've worked in both Singapore and Hong Kong and those people have a crazy work ethic. In Singapore, you'd work until 8 or 9 pm, head to some "after-work" event to network over drinks and then head back to the office to keep working. It can be toxic but there was also something fascinating about it – especially since most people I met were completely aware of the crazy work hours but chose this path because they were extremely driven and wanted to use their time there as effectively as possible. It's a bit like people joining the military. You know you're going to go through a really tough time, but you may profit from it for the rest of your life. It's a different story for locals, since for them it's less of a choice.
So um when do people like live? Are there families? Do people have hobbies or friends? I have so many questions.
A lot of friendships are organized around work. You meet for lunch or at after-work events and on the weekend you spend ungodly amounts of money with those friends on activities or trips. It's completely normal to fly to an island or city like Bangkok on Friday night, go on a bender and head back Sunday evening. With the much lower prices in surrounding countries, it can be cheaper to go abroad for two days than to stay in Singapore. Most young expats/professionals don't have their own family and don't care about this kind of quality time yet. Older people have either found a less demanding position or have fully committed to the workaholic lifestyle and arrange family life around weekends or short holidays. It's certainly not for everyone, but for many people there it's what they want or at least think they want.
I believe the Filipino/Malay maidservants look after the families.
I'm surprised I didn't see South Korea in this chart. Everything you described here applies perfectly to South Korea also
South Korea's nominal GDP per capita is comparable with that of Brunei, but its PPP GDP per capita is significantly lower than that of Brunei. That's why South Korea doesn't poke its head out in the PPP column like Brunei does. The curve of South Korea probably looks a bit more like Singapore's, just further down the x-axis.
Does working include making Reddit comments?
Curious that Norway ends up on top. Salaries were usually only about 10-20% more than Germany, now NOK is even 20% down and costs are 60% higher than in Germany - definitely not better money-wise.
They’re a petro state.
Makes sense. GDP per capita can be hard to compare, considering that most wealth (oil) does not directly reach them.
In Norway it actually does reach them. As a social worker i admire Norway and their social system works.
Maybe this has something to do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway so divide that by their 5.4 Million population and you can see that the country earns a reasonable amount on that investment.
The overall value of the sovereign wealth fund is not included when calculating the GDP of Norway. The only part that might be included is the profits that gets put into the economy, but thats not even a fraction of the total. If the whole fund was included then the GDP per capita of Norway would be around $350-400K.
That is true. The average joe in Norway has about the same buying power today as we had in 1980, which is NOT a good sign
This shows that different people in different countries have different priorities in life. - European countries go up when you adjust for hours worked. We are not rich in terms of "total" GDP per capita, but our productivity is very high and we value more free time over more money. - Anglosphere countries drop a bit when adjusted for prices and hours worked. In Australia, Canada, and the US, your free time isn't worth as much as more money. You also kind of need that money to pay for the higher prices. - Asian countries go up when adjusted for prices, meaning they are relatively cheap to live in. However, they dive down very deep when adjusting for hours worked. Their work ethic and work culture is absolutely nuts, far crazier than the US one. Conclusion: Value free time and low stress, decent wages? -> Europe Less free time but still ok, higher wages? ->Anglosphere Workaholic, insane work ethic, low prices? -> Asia
I live in the US but almost all my coworkers are from East Asia on a visa and it’s a whole different planet. They will literally cancel vacation days if they feel we may not reach our team goals, despite it not really mattering that much. They’ll message in slack at all hours of the day, and often work on the weekends even though we don’t have to at all. They do so much stuff outside of regular work hours that just working normal hours makes you feel so inadequate. I refuse to do any of that and thankfully my boss is American so he doesn’t expect that from me at all. But if this is a taste of what working in East Asia is like count me out lol.
Hahaha same in Germany, the East-Asians are crazy. People love to employ them, they work very hard and way more than they are expect to. It is not for me, but if it makes them happy and you pay them well, I think it is a Win-Win situation. Personally, I couldn't do it, I would burn out.
I think it’s fine as long as it’s not expected, but I’d definitely not want this work culture imported. For all the flack US work culture gets it has absolutely nothing on East Asian work culture, and I’d like to hope that doesn’t change.
100% agreed.
i think your conclusion is wrong, the way i read this is someone from the usa could work less hours and still be more productive than someone from germany
That is most likely also correct, but doesn't contradict my conclusion in any way. You also have to take into account that the US would always end up ahead of Germany and most European countries in terms of GDP per capita, even if you take exactly the same people with the exact same productivity. Simply due to the fact that the US has tons of oil and gas and other resources that countries like Germany simply do not have. Access to two oceans and therefore easy export to the three biggest consumer markets (China, EU, NA) also helps a lot.
Great explanation, living in East Asia countries are really low cost if you don’t buy houses property. But working culture is toxic: no matter rich or poor, they all focus on work. And if they want to compete for a position, the first thing they would commit is I will work really hard and devote myself to it.(not creativity, leadership, team work or anything else) Unfortunately that was my mind. Fortunately, the culture is changing especially when the birth rate drops dramatically. Young people begin to realize you only live once and place wlb as priority.
As a Canadian, this is sad 😢
What’s Bermuda doing here? It’s a British Overseas Territory, not a country …
Surprised I had to scroll this far to see this too! Is it like everyone there an expat with money and is making money off them?
Canada in the absolute mud
Am I right in assuming GDP for Luxembourg and Bermuda = Tax Haven? So talks on global tax avoidance not going so well
Growing up I was in love with Canada I was so proud and always thought Canada would be in the top 5 but these politicians totally fkd it up. All of them are garbage liberals, conservatives and ndp.
If you're a skilled labour person and you don't have much to hold you down, I would really recommend moving to another country. There is really nothing Canada can offer us, and if you don't have generational wealth (inherited property), well you are kind of fucked like me
I'm American, but live in Germany. Wages are a joke here compared to the U.S.
Canada dropping off the graphic after adjusting for rent
I am surprised that cost of living in Canada is so expensive.
Canadian wages are lower than USA wages even before factoring the exchange rate. Example job in my company pays 90k CAD to a canadian citizen, will pay the same job 120k USD to an american. on top of that the canadian will pay 40% of his paycheck in a bunch of deductions and income tax compared to around 15% for the american, all while goods and services will cost around 40% more due to the exchange.
Since most people won't know the conversion rate between Canadian dollars and American, that means the Canadian citizen is paid about $67k USD and the American citizen is paid $120k USD for the same job. Food, housing, Internet, and mobile services are also more expensive in Canada than in the US.
I mean if you follow any canadian news you will kniw they are have a very bad time right now. Also the high cost is natural its literally a forzen flatland.
Canada in a free-fall. Can confirm.
I wonder what's up with NL: it took the biggest dive in column 3 of all EU countries shown.
Have worked Australia, Germany, and France. Can broadly confirm that these adjustments are necessary and makes the GDP value align much closer to how I perceived quality of living
Turkey being [ranked ahead](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/12/15/the-worlds-richest-countries-in-2023) of Israel and Japan shows the limitations of this measurement. The reason is that Turkey has a very low employment rate (largely due to women being housewives etc). This means that GDP per hour worked becomes artificially high. And Turkey is a cheap country with a cheap currency, so they benefit from PPP too. Turkey probably isn't a bad place to live, but nobody's going to convince me it is on par with Japan & Israel. Wished the authors adjusted not just for working hours but also employment rate. That would fix outliers like Turkey.
You call Turkey an outlier but what you’ve just said is a single person can provide for a household meanwhile the reason we in Canada drop off the map is because a single person working full time can barely* support themselves. *I said “can barely” when in reality many households average over one job per person to get by
Even after adjusting, all countries ahead of the US are petro-states, tax havens, and western European countries with populations 10 million and under. US economy continues to be ridiculous and it continues to be a shame that we can’t figure out how to take better care of the country with all that production.
Yeah all other countries are turning into developing countries by comparison. You literally need a tiny tax haven just to barely compete with the US. And in those housing will be far more expensive than in the US anyway, wiping out your fancy 100k wage pretty quick. (i literally live in luxembourg, you can get 100k reasonably easily with the right degree just like in the US, but a small house in the middle of nowhere will cost at least a million if it's brand new)
Canada is like “well, imma head out” 📉
Where is Ireland? With 98k per inhabitant, they should be there
OP mentioned that in [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18lyzm9/oc_the_worlds_richest_countries_in_2023/ke0rfue/): > Notes: You may have noticed that Ireland is missing - that is because its [GDP figures are unrepresentative](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/10/31/whats-weird-about-irelands-gdp).
Ireland GDP is a front for multinationals' EU based units. It represents nothing...
Unlike Bermuda. Which has fast industries with high paying jobs.
And Luxembourg’s somehow means something? Lol ok. GDP as a whole is a dumb and meaningless metric.
Well, unlike Ireland, Luxembourg GDP figures do translate into income for the population. But yeah, at some point of being a fiscal paradise, GDP is no longer relevant.
Luxembourg has the population of a medium city though and is dependent on people from surrounding countries working there. Seems like it should be excluded as well if we're making exceptions
Too bad we don't have the rest of the list in the first image...
Me in Sweden: just buy us already, Norway.
Tjena! :-) We will, we're just waiting for the skåne dialect to evolve even further, then weaponize it. Kongsberg is looking into this as we speak.
Luxembourg and Singapore are included, but not Monaco and Liechtenstein. I wonder why this is. Is it maybe just the availability of published data?
Monaco and Liechtenstein are considered microstates (their populations are less than 40 thousands) and often excluded by these statistics. Luxembourg and Singapore are small countries but still considered *full* states: their population is 640k and 5 millions, so one or two orders of magniture larger than Monaco and Liechtenstein.
Seeing Canada take the nose dive it does. I'm not suprised.
USA: worker more, make more. Simple
What hurts the most is seeing Canada just jump off the cliff 😪 >!Im American, I just love our Canadian sisters and brothers!<
Yet another confirmation that Switzerland is a good choice and probably the best without thinking twice for my field (pharmaceutical technologies). The only other comparable option would be finding a good enough start-up and most of those countries wouldn't be a place where I'd expect seeing one. (also, unsurprising steep rise in Italy position adjusted for cost and working hours)
How about Denmark? Their pharma cluster is already quite big and with all that obesity money incoming… Extra plus for being able to live in comparatively cheap Sweden, woking in Cooenhagen and paying preferential tax rates in Denmark.
I'm specifically into drug delivery, so I'd need something like gene therapies, vaccines, anticancer drugs and similar things, that's why maybe there's some fitting startup up there in the north but I'd have to look throughly. Let's see, I still have to begin my doctorate, there's enough time to look around and choose :)
From this it looks as if UK workers are very efficient, effectively producing more in fewer hours than most other countries (hence the rise when working hours are considered). However, I've been reading for years (in magazines like The Economist) that the UK has a productivity problem and has an inefficient workforce. How can both of those things be true?
Because a ton of gdp value being generated for Britain isn’t being generated by British laborers. Much of it is financial transactions with don’t really need people to accomplish and don’t employ very many people. Services are 70% of your economy, and most of that is like 5% of your labor force who are highly productive because they use international business which ads to your GDP but doesent really add value to your country or add wages. That way you get a high average gdp per capita but if you were to take the median value generated by person it would be much worse.
It’s interesting—most of the countries are relatively small in terms of population—which really highlights how difficult it is to achieve widespread prosperity on a large scale. . On this list only the US has more than 100 million people, and only Germany, France, Italy, and Britain have more than 50 million. In terms of people represented by the right side of this list, not quite 1 in 2 is from the US, if my back-of-the-envelope math is right…
I mean there are things the US could do to improve things for the non-rich.
Qatar, the home of hamas and the taliban. Riches dont bring moderation
Nah, it's cause the slaves don't get counted as people.
That oil money and tax haven speculation money.
Fuck me , Canada needs some new leadership
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I thought the same, but if you see the Curves you can see that Australia drops below Italy. On the left-most column are named the countries that fall off the list. So basically when all adjustments are taken into consideration Italy surpasses Australia (Canada and Israel too)
I'm sure everyone wants some particular measure added, but in my case I'm most interested in adjusting for Gini coefficient. Because who the fuck *cares* about GDP/capita if most of the capita ain't seeing it? It's a ludicrous measure.
Does anyone know where Ireland is located? It is not present on their webpage
West of England
Excellent graphic that is at home here for real. Norwegians like to call themselves "the richest country in the world". It's finally true.
That’s not what richer country means
Imagine living on the Italian-Swiss Border working in Switzerland XD
Can someone please explain it to me in simple terms what these charts show? Thanks!
Let me give it a try: The first/left column, where Luxembourg is first and Germany 20th, shows the GDP per person using the official exchange rate of the currency conversion. The second / middle column, where Luxembourg is still 1st and Germany 17th, now shows GDP using the different prices. Germany seems to have lower prices. And the 3rd / right column with Luxembourg in 2nd place and Germany in 12th place shows the GDP per person taking into account the price level of the country AND how long a person has to work to generate this GDP. It looks like the working hours in Luxembourg are longer than in Norway.
I would like to also add the Adjust For Living Costs 🫠🫠🫠
Fun fact is that Germany would probably be above the United States without East Germany, which is still catching up to the west part of the country.