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11/01/2005 - The OECD today issued new comparative figures for gross domestic product based on purchasing power parities (PPPs) for 2002. The latest figures, compiled jointly with the European Communities’ statistical office, Eurostat, enable a comparison of the economic size of 42 countries.
When compared with 1999, the previous benchmark year, one remarkable development is that Ireland has moved up into the group of “high income” countries.
Because slight differences in the PPP indices of GDP per person are not statistically significant enough to establish a strict ranking, the OECD has divided the countries into four groups according to income level. The index takes the average GDP per head of the 30 countries of the OECD as its baseline 100.
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High income (index above 120): Luxembourg, Norway, US, Ireland and Switzerland.
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High middle income (100-120): Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Canada, Iceland, UK, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, Finland, France, Japan, Italy, and Germany.
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Low middle income (50 -99): Spain, Israel, New Zealand, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Slovenia, Korea, Malta, Czech Republic and Hungary.
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Low income (below 50): Slovak Republic, Estonia, Poland, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Mexico, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
The index for Ireland rose to 129 in 2002 from 114 in 1999. Elsewhere the groupings remained generally unchanged.
Purchasing power parities (PPPs) are currency conversion rates that enable comparison of GDP by taking into account price differences between countries. The latest benchmark results, released every three years, reflect a new set of price quotations for a basket of about 3000 comparable and representative goods and services which make up GDP.
See the latest set of figures and explanatory note
For further information on PPPs, journalists are invited to contact the OECD's Statistics Directorate website http://www.oecd.org/std/ppp or stat.contact@oecd.org, or the OECD’s Media Relations Division (tel: 00 331 4524 9700). Further detailed results, such as PPP comparisons for private final consumption, will be available in the forthcoming Purchasing Power Parities and Real Expenditures: 2002 Results. To obtain a copy, journalists should contact the Media Relations Division.
Eurostat provided the data for the 25 EU member states and 6 other associated European countries. Final results for 2002 are available from Statistics in Focus (13 December 2004) and on the website http://europa.eu.int/comm/eurostat/
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