Top 10 Richest Countries in Asia

There must be a scientific explanation for how I manage to forget Brunei on every quiz I take. Immaterial on quizzes like 'desert countries,' or 'countries where gay marriage is legal.' But when I reach for the brain cell labelled 'Brunei,' I just grab air. Sigh.

I'm the same, I get to the B's and I'm like Bhutan, Burundi and I always forget Brunei

Well, this was easy.

I thought Singapore was going to be in it

Yes, how disappointed you must have been when it turned out to be second on the list.

I too, wished the movie It took place in Singapore. Unfortunately, they just picked some random town in the US.

Like all of them were in the Middle East. What's up with that?

(Excluding the 5 of them that are not).

oil and what kogatora said.

The usual suspects. I more or less expected to see Israel, but they got some tough competition apparently.

It's because they're using PPP. Israel in reality has a higher GDP per capita than the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Brunei, South Korea, Kuwait, Bahrain, Taiwan, or Saudi Arabia, but because it's a relatively more expensive place to live when you adjust for PPP then its economy gets unrealistically deflated. A lot of this I imagine has to do with out-of-control housing prices in Israel. Nominal GDP is not affected at all by the vagaries of housing market bubbles blowing up the price of rent. And perhaps counter-intuitively if there is a massive housing market crash in Israel, substantially lowering housing prices (but probably badly damaging the economy), it's PPP GDP per capita could go UP because PPP would calculate that shekels suddenly became worth more, even though everywhere else they would be worth the same

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Brunei are very cheap countries to live in so their numbers go up.

I was always under the impression that the Japanese and South Koreans were financially better off than these quizzes demonstrate. Very surprising to see Japan ranked so lowly.

100%

You should really add an inequality index such as GINI somewhere in there. Also, accounting for non-citizen residents may shift this list quite a bit.

I'm kind of shocked that Israel isn't on here. I guess they don't really produce and export like the other nations.

Look again. Singapore is #1. Which is, to me anyway, as surprising as a version of this where they don't make the cut.

All I can say is there is 6 in Middle East

overstated but agreed in principle. PPP has *something* to do with real life... it's just a very bad way to measure total GDP.

Japan and china aren’t rich?

Japan: very high HDI, well-developed and generally prosperous. But the quiz uses PPP and many cities in Japan, most notably Tokyo, have a very high cost of living. So they get docked using this magical figuring. Another thing to consider is that Japan has extremely high income equality, relatively speaking.. so even next to some countries with higher GDP per capita Japan usually has less wealth concentrated at the top and fewer citizens living in poverty.

China: their economy has been growing by leaps and bound and they're about 100x better off now than they were under Mao and before adopting some free market economic reforms, but certainly they are still quite far from being a "rich" country. Maybe in another 2-3 decades, though I suspect that their one-child policy is going to start having a serious dire impact on their fortunes within the same time frame as they start running out of younger people to grow the economy and support their aging population.

Imagine how PPP rich you’d be if you commuted to Japan from North Korea!

Oh yeah, Singapore's a country, isn't it...