Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface to the second edition
- Acknowledgements
- Reading the tables
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 People
- 2 Government and politics
- 3 Economics
- 4 Work and labour
- 5 Government taxes and spending
- 6 Health
- 7 Education
- 8 Inequality and social welfare
- 9 International relations
- 10 Environment
- 11 Science and technology
- 12 Telecommunications and computing
- 13 Media
- 14 Family
- 15 Lifestyles and consumption
- 16 Crime and social problems
- 17 The search for scoreboards
- 18 The Howard impact
- Sources and references
3 - Economics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface to the second edition
- Acknowledgements
- Reading the tables
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 People
- 2 Government and politics
- 3 Economics
- 4 Work and labour
- 5 Government taxes and spending
- 6 Health
- 7 Education
- 8 Inequality and social welfare
- 9 International relations
- 10 Environment
- 11 Science and technology
- 12 Telecommunications and computing
- 13 Media
- 14 Family
- 15 Lifestyles and consumption
- 16 Crime and social problems
- 17 The search for scoreboards
- 18 The Howard impact
- Sources and references
Summary
National prosperity
Income per person, or GDP per capita, is the standard way of measuring the average material standard of living of a country's population, although of course it tells us nothing about how evenly or unevenly income is distributed. Comparisons of the living standards of different countries are sometimes made by simply converting each country's GDP per capita to a common currency, such as US dollars. However, this fails to allow for the fact that the amount of goods or services one US dollar buys differs greatly from one country to another. For this reason, international comparisons of living standards are more accurate when the common currency used has been adjusted to ensure it has similar purchasing power in each country. Table 3.1 uses US dollar annual amounts after they have been painstakingly adjusted by the OECD to achieve purchasing power parity (PPP) between countries.
Leaving aside the special case of Norway – a small country with the good fortune to have discovered oil and the even greater good fortune of having a government with the foresight to carefully invest much of the proceeds – the table shows the United States is the most prosperous of the major economies. More surprising is the new-found affluence of Ireland, the Celtic Tiger. What stands out from the table is the way living standards in the developed world have converged.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- How Australia Compares , pp. 46 - 71Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009