https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html
Macau #1 is like the wealthiest US county being the area of DC where druglords reside.
|4|MACAU|$114,400|2017 EST.|
|7|SINGAPORE|$90,500|2017 EST.|
|18|HONG KONG|$61,000|2017 EST.|
|20|UNITED STATES|$59,500|2017 EST.|
|30|TAIWAN|$49,800|2017 EST.|
|41|JAPAN|$42,700|2017 EST.|
|45|KOREA, SOUTH|$39,400|2017 EST.|
nice to see South Korea at the bottom of something for a change.
Putting a big country like US in there is pretty distorted.
Taiwan has good PPP because we have bad air and water qualIty, dodgy food for poor people and live in small apartments with few facilities and massive income gaps. Not a big believer in PPP. Yes there a few good things here such as cheap public transport and rents are lower (thats more a function of poor economy and low immigration of course).
We know that in Taipei average salary is around 480,000 ntd but outside Taipei it’s around 300,000 ntd per year. 75% of under 35s make less than 480,000 ntd per year in the whole island.
There are some different numbers quoted for median and average salaries, however at the high end it’s still only 48,000 ntd per month.
This PPP would have us believe the average income was around 1,500,000 ntd per year (about four times average ) which is complete bullshit.
i’m always baffled at those stats at how skewed they are.
i can understand that city states(or SAR) like sg,hk,macau have a rather high GDP
due the large number of rich people settling there. but how can taiwan be above japan and south korea? average income must be way lower here and the number of rich people imo can’t outweigh that factor.
if anyone would like to explain this discrepancy between statistics and everyday reality, please go on, i’m all ears.
I recall that GDP is the sum of all income and outgoings of an economy.
If your country does a lot of trading where money is funneled throiugh your country (eg China manufacturing, booked in Taiwan before end if tax year) it could distort the GDP number. Possibly high levels of real estate transactions can distort it also.
I know this because it has happened in Ireland where things like how much Viagra was sold in a year or how Apple booked their revenue from EU in a given year can boost or drop Ireland’s GDP markedly. They call it leprechaun economics (but to be fair wages in Ireland are actually high too unlike Taiwan).
Look at this list of PPP versus Nominal Incomes.
Most are only different by 10% or so. Korea for example. But there is also a huge discrepancy with the GDP/PPP numbers from the CIA above for Korea (this has 30k USD while above list has 40k USD).
But they don’t list Taiwan in most stats because it’s not in the UN. Nice to see Taiwan listed as country by the CIA.
hmm, could make sense, since everything here is so cheap.
you could get a ghetto taofang for 5k, health insurance is also cheap. and after that you still have some money to buy you a nice gucci bag.
what those stats never include is the overall living quality and that’s what bugs me.
Yes most costs are ‘cheaper’ but not housing purchase or groceries or branded goods or overseas travel and education. Housing purchase costs alone woud surely kill those high PPP rankings if included. Then it comes down to personal preference and circumstances (rather cheap rent or a cheap housing purchase).
But PPP is still a really poor way to measure quality of life as we know apart from the discrepancies in how it’s calculated.
For instance most of those Asian countries have poor environments and people are overworked plus living space is tiny. I mean they are not bad places but far from ideal places to live and work for most.
i’d really like to ask the cia how they came up with that stat but i’m afraid if i did so i will never be heard of again
Economists prefer the PPP over nominal. Korea is wealthier than Taiwan at the exchange rate.
[quote]
I recall that GDP is the sum of all income and outgoings of an economy.[/quote]
You’re thinking about the trade balance. That’s one component of GDP.
GDP is a measure of value added, not sales.