Editors of American Demographics | May 2003
My store sells Third World handicrafts. As a fair trade organization, we seek to market the crafts of Third World artisans and to inform Americans about those artisans. I have had trouble finding the numbers to make a meaningful comparison between the income of my customers and that of the craftsmen we work with. Can you help me find such numbers? Specifically, I would like to find out how the income of the average American - or better yet, of the average San Francisco Bay Area resident - compares with the average income of people in other parts of the globe. Brian Smucker Baksheesh Sonoma, Calif.
Dear Brian: When compared with the other people with whom we share this planet, Americans are not just wealthy, we're loaded.
According to an estimate provided by the Washington, D.C.-based World Bank, the combined gross national income [GNI] of all countries totaled $31.3 trillion in 2001 [the latest year for which data is available]. Divvy that up among the world's 6.1 billion inhabitants, and you get just $5,170 for every man, woman and child on Earth.
Of course, we all know that global profits are not equally distributed. Of the 234 nations for which data is available from the World Bank, the U.S. claimed a third of the income earned worldwide in 2001, or $9.9 trillion - more than any other single country. If America's GNI were divided equally among its 284 million residents, there would be enough for $34,870 per American - 6.7 times the world average!
Even so, Americans are still not the richest people on the planet. That title goes to the residents of Luxembourg, a country where the per capita GNI is $41,770, according to the World Bank. Also ahead of the U.S. are [in descending order] Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Japan, Norway and Bermuda. At the opposite end of the wealth spectrum, however, are such countries as Ethiopia, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Niger and Eritrea, each of which has an annual GNI per capita of less than $200. [To see how some other countries compare to the U.S., see chart below.]
In low-income countries where the annual GNI per capita is $745 or less, the average life expectancy is only 58.9 years, compared with 77.5 years in the U.S. Eighty out of every 1,000 newborns die in low-income countries each year, versus only seven in the U.S. Just 59.8 percent of children are immunized against measles in those nations, compared with 91 percent of children stateside. And there are only six computers per 1,000 residents; in America there are 625.
Although the World Bank does not report how different regions of the U.S. fare in comparison with other parts of the world, figures from the U.S. Census Bureau can help shed some light for us. According to Census 2000, the median household income of Bay Area residents is 1.5 times that of the nation as a whole. In other words, San Franciscans can most definitely afford to pay a fair price for a handwoven tapestry or a handmade woodcarving.
TRICKLE DOWN?
The gross national income [GNI] per capita of the United States is 249 times that of Sierra Leone.
COUNTRY GNI PER CAPITA* INDEX** Luxembourg $41,770 0.8 Switzerland $36,970 0.9 United States $34,870 1.0 Canada $21,340 1.6 Greece $11,780 3.0 Mexico $5,540 6.3 Chile $4,350 8.0 Malaysia $3,640 9.6 Brazil $3,060 11.4 Morocco $1,180 29.6 China $890 39.2 Indonesia $680 51.3 India $460 75.8 Kenya $340 102.6 Sierra Leone $140 249.1 *GNI per capita refers to a country's gross national income divided by the total population of the country. **The U.S. average is 1. For example, the GNI per capita of the United States is 8 times that of Chile. Source: World Bank, 2001Editors of American Demographics:
