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What is the difference between world largest economic countries and richest countries?

Gokula Khanal
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You'd have to know how the article/speaker defined richest, but in most articles I've seen they are using per-capita GDP. Qatar's per-person GDP is higher than other countries. Many of the small oil-producing countries are high on these lists. The GDP of Qatar is ~$150 billion, whereas the GDP of the United States is ~$19 trillion. The US is a much larger economy, but it also has far more people, so the per capita GDP is lower in the US than Qatar.

Hart CO
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  • Indeed, we could reasonably ask whether Qatar actually has an economy, if (as was the case at one time) foreign companies do all the work of discovering & extracting the oil, and all the Qataris do is collect money. It's the difference between working for a living, and living on an inheritance from your parents. – jamesqf May 13 '18 at 17:51
  • If interested, using World Bank figures (given when you put "population of Qatar" etc. in Google) you get: US: $18.57T / 323.4M = $57,977 (quoted: $57,466). Qatar: $152.5B / 2.57M = $59,338 (quoted: $59,330). The first per-capita-GDP figure is the one I calculated from the GDPs/populations; the second is the quoted per-capita-GDP. All figures are for 2016. – TripeHound May 14 '18 at 09:21