List of regions by past GDP (PPP) per capita

These are lists of regions and countries by their estimated real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), the value of all final goods and services produced within a country/region in a given year divided by population size.

Since pre-modern societies, by modern standards, were characterized by a very low degree of urbanization and a large majority of people working in the agricultural sector, economic historians prefer to express income in cereal units.

To achieve comparability over space and time, these numbers are then converted into monetary units such as international dollars, a step which leaves a relatively wide margin of interpretation.

[9] Others such as Andre Gunder Frank, Robert A. Denemark, Kenneth Pomeranz and Amiya Kumar Bagchi have criticized Maddison for grossly underestimating per-capita income and GDP growth rates in Asia (again, mainly China and India) for the three centuries up to 1820, and for refusing to take into account contemporary research demonstrating significantly higher per-capita income and growth rates in Asia.

[18] Economic historians Angus Maddison, Stephen Broadberry, Hanhui Guan, David Daokui, Li Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Yi Xu, Zhihong Shi, Bas van Leeuwen, Yuping Ni, Zipeng Zhang, and Ye Ma have offered differing estimates of historic productivity in region, but show a similar trend of a decline between the beginning of the 17th and middle of the 20th centuries, before recovering: The following estimates were made by the economic historian Paul Bairoch.

[25] The following estimates are taken from a revision of Angus Maddison's numbers for Western Europe by the Italian economists Elio Lo Cascio and Paolo Malanima.

[27] According to economic historians Prasannan Parthasarathi and Jeffrey G. Williamson, earnings data from primary sources show that mid-late 18th-century real wages and living standards in Bengal sultanate (under the Nawabs of Bengal) a South Indian Kingdom of Mysore and Maratha Empire were higher than in Britain, which in turn had the highest living standards in Europe.

[28][29][31] Economic historians Angus Maddison,[32] Stephen Broadberry, Johann Custodis, Bishnupriya Gupta,[33] Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong and Jan Luiten van Zanden[19] have offered differing estimates of historic productivity in region, but show a similar trend of a decline between the beginning of the 17th and middle of the 19th centuries, before recovering: According to economic historian Jean Batou, Ottoman Egypt's average per-capita income in 1800 was comparable to that of leading Western European countries such as France, and higher than the overall average income of Europe and Japan.

[39] Italia is considered the richest region, due to tax transfers from the provinces and the concentration of elite income in the heartland; its GDP per capita is estimated at having been around 40%[47] to 66%[48] higher than in the rest of the empire.