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Austrian China's avatar

This is an excellent point; using the actual working population to calculate per capita GDP provides important insight into understanding trends, especially with regard to Japan. That said, you might want to consider applying this to productive GDP instead of merely GDP calculated at purchasing power parity (PPP). Productive GDP excludes services; not because services are unimportant, but because they are much harder to effectively value, and often include very dubious components like imputed rental value or mandatory insurance.

We published an extensive article in June 2023 about why this measurement is more meaningful; it's here: https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/chinas-shocking-worldwide-economic.

One of these days we will publish some updated calculations based on the latest numbers, but the situation has not changed much.

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Richard Hanania's avatar

This is looking at immigration in a way that is too uncharitable. A poor Mexican comes to the US. Then you say he brings the US GDP per capita down. But it doesn’t make Americans who were already here poorer. You might even want to judge his income relative to what it is in Mexico and get growth from that. Poor immigrants can bring GDP per capita down but make natives better off by moving them up into more productive jobs like in management roles. So America bringing in a lot of immigrants and growing more per capita is quite impressive.

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