[isaidso]

^^ I fully expect Canada to pass Italy, France, and the UK in my life time.

Originally Posted by esquire

^ Surprising. It doesn't feel that way, although living in a city where one tends to always hear the reasons why seemingly normal things like providing basic infrastructure (recreational, transportation, etc.) can't be done obviously shapes my feelings on the matter.

Originally Posted by Acajack

Same here. I've travelled quite a bit all over the world, and Canada definitely feels "middling" among the world's wealthier countries, as opposed to a front-runner.

I'll quote the introductory paragraphs of the study. It sheds light on why they chose to tabulate this data and how. I put in bold the part that sums it up best.

Is gross domestic product a sufficient measure of an economy’s health? Many argue that GDP, which counts the sum of the goods and services produced by a nation, fails to reflect a population’s wellbeing, because it accounts for neither distribution of income nor extractive effects such as pollution.

This week, the World Bank published an ambitious project to measure economies by wealth, to get a more complete picture of a nation’s health, both in the present and the future. The Changing Wealth of Nations analyzes the wealth of 141 countries, from 1995 to 2014. The report argues that wealth is a better judge of economic success because it measures the flow of income that a country’s assets generate over time—although it is significantly more challenging to measure. “A country’s level of economic development is strongly related to the composition of its national wealth,” the report states.

Wealth includes all assets, which means human capital (the value of earnings over a person’s lifetime), natural capital (energy, minerals, agricultural land), produced capital (machinery, buildings, urban land), and net foreign assets.

Assessing an economy by GDP instead of wealth is like looking exclusively at a company’s income statements without considering the assets on its balance sheet. A company can make its income look good for a short time by liquidating assets, but over the long run this will reduce the firm’s productive capacity and other means of generating income in the future.

The same applies to a country. GDP “does not reflect depreciation and depletion of assets, whether investment and accumulation of wealth are keeping pace with population growth, or whether the mix of assets is consistent with a country’s development goals,” the report states. That said, for most countries GDP is strongly correlated to wealth.

https://qz.com/1194051/a-new-world-b...trys-progress/