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Wealth Year 1990

Map No. 163

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In 1990 the region with the lowest wealth or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was Central Africa. The GDP of Central Africa was 0.8% of the GDP of the richest region, North America. If just 1% of the North America’s GDP had been redistributed to Central Africa the region’s GDP would have more than doubled.

Wealth per person had doubled since 1960, and the world GDP rose from PPP US$8 trillion to US$27 trillion over these thirty years. This vast increase in wealth was distributed in a broadly similar pattern to 30 years before. One change is the growth of Japan, China, the Republic of Korea and Taiwan.

“As of 1990 ... the Korean stock market was equal in size to all the emerging markets of East Asia combined." Andrew Horvat, 2005

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide Gross Domestic Product measured in US$ equalised for purchasing power parity that was produced there in 1990.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page