Richest and Poorest Countries. There are two standard methods of measuring the wealth of countries and how rich or poor its inhabitants are.
The measure most often used is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which represents the size of a country's economy. A refinement of this is per-capita GDP, which is a measure of the average welfare and affluence, or poverty, of residents of a country. However, GDP and per-capita GDP are less useful when comparing economies across national boundaries - which one must do to determine the richest or poorest countries in the world - because GDP is expressed in a country's local currency. The measure that most economists prefer, therefore, is GDP (PPP) ["GDP based on purchasing power parity"] per capita.
GDP (PPP) per capita compares generalized differences in living standards on the whole between nations because PPP takes into account the relative cost of living and the inflation rates of countries, rather than using just exchange rates, which may distort the real differences in income.
Poverty. Massive Biometric Project Gives Millions of Indians an ID. In India, hundreds of millions of impoverished people have no ID—which means no bank account, credit, insurance, or government aid.Photo: Jonathan Torgovnik; Fingerprints: Getty The courtyard, just off a busy street in a Delhi slum called Mongolpuri, is buzzing with people—men in plastic sandals arguing with one another, women in saris holding babies on their hips, skinny young guys chattering on cheap cell phones.
New arrivals take up positions at the end of a long queue leading to the gated entry of a low cement building. Every so often, a worker opens the gate briefly and people elbow their way inside onto a dimly lit stairway, four or five on each step. Slowly they work their way upward to a second-story landing, where they are stopped again by a steel grille. Global Issues : social, political, economic and environmental issues that affect us all.
Countries in the World.