By Keoni Everington,Taiwan News, Staff Writer

2019/05/07 15:51

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) -- Taiwan was ranked as the 17th richest country in the world by Global Finance Magazine based on per capita income and adjusted for purchasing power.

In its latest report on relative levels of wealth and poverty released on April 22 titled "The World's Richest and Poorest Countries 2019," Global Finance listed Taiwan in 17th place out of 191 countries.

The top spot on the list was taken by Qatar, ahead of Macau (2), Luxembourg (3), Singapore, (4), Brunei (5), Ireland (6), Norway (7), United Arab Emirates (8), Kuwait (9), and Hong Kong (10), rounding out the top ten. Also finishing ahead of Taiwan were Switzerland (11), the U.S. (12), San Marino (13), the Netherlands (14), Saudi Arabia (15), and Iceland (16).

As for Asia, Taiwan ranked in 9th place and in East Asia, Taiwan came in 3rd place, trailing only Macau and Hong Kong. The bottom 13 countries were all from Africa, with Burundi in last place at 191.

China came in at a lowly 74th place, just ahead of the Dominican Republic and behind Montenegro. Despite having the second-largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world, China lagged far behind other countries such as Taiwan because of its huge population, which greatly lowers its per capita income.

To generate the list, Global Finance took into account per capita income (PCI) and adjusted it for purchasing power parity (PPP), which factors in inflation rates and the price of goods and services in a given locale. Global Finance gathered the data used in the report from the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook, April 2019.