GDP per capita (PPP)

GDP per capita, PPP (purchasing power parity) expresses each country's gross domestic product per person in current international dollars, adjusting for price-level differences between countries. Source indicator: World Bank NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD.

Because the distribution is heavily right-skewed, WorldScore normalizes with log + min-max: we take the natural log of each value, then min-max scale across all countries with data. This means the score reflects relative position on a log scale, not a linear one. Direction is higher_better (100 = highest GDP per capita in the dataset).

Important — this score is _relative_, not absolute. The 0 and 100 anchors are the poorest and richest countries *in the current dataset* (this country set, this run). A country's score therefore says "where it sits among today's countries", not a fixed value on an absolute scale. Two consequences:

- Not year-over-year comparable. If next year's data shifts the richest or poorest country, or the country set changes, the same raw GDP could map to a different score. Compare raw values across years, not scores. The exact datasetMin/datasetMax used are stored in each observation's norm_params_json so any score is reconstructable. - The endpoints move. 100 is always "the current maximum", not "rich enough". (The same caveat applies to every dataset-relative method — minmax, log_minmax, percentile.)

We use each country's most recent available year (World Bank "most recent value"); the exact year is stored per observation. Coverage: countries without a World Bank estimate show "no data".