Today, the economics of the world is more dynamic and unpredictable than never before. This dynamism in turn significantly affects the standing of the countries in the world by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita ranking (Pasquali, 2015; The World Bank Group, 2016). Every year, the ranking looks different, but these fluctuations are so volatile that they may occur even over a span of a month. While some countries gain rank and others fall off their position, there is no telling that countries at the top of the list are well the most influential nations in the world today. The 20 richest countries in the World by 2015 GDP per capita based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) shows Qatar leading and Australia closing the pack (Pasquali, 2015: The World Bank Group, 2016) (Table 1).
There are two general types of data: Qualitative data and Qualitative Data ((Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). Quantitative data is information about quantities that can be expressed, measured, and written down as numbers. Examples of Quantitative data include shoe number, height, and as in this case, the statistical figures of the top 20 richest countries in the world by GDP per capita income. These kinds of information, unlike qualitative data, can be represented by a ratio, interval, or ordinal scales and lend themselves to mathematical as well as statistical manipulation. Qualitative data, on the other hand, refers to information about qualities that cannot be expressed as a number such as an eye color (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). The data collected in Table 1 are therefore quantitative data because they are numerically represented and can be subjected to statistical manipulation as shown (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016).
The range of the data is 96,719.3 GDP per capita and is colossal. It indicates that the gap between the richest country and the poorest county in this category has a more than 96,700 monetary between them. The average and the median of the values, on the other hand, are 66,706.60 and 55,034.40 respectively. Because the mean is higher than the median, this suggests that the distribution of the data is skewed to the right (a positive skew). Loosely, speaking, this also means that the data entries higher than the median are far away from the median than the data sets lower than the median. From the table, 15 countries have a real income per capita greater than the average income. Only five (Australia, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Austria) have a real income lower than the mean income. The variance of the top 20 richest countries stands at 832,291,993.7 while the standard deviation of the data is 28,849.47129. Only three countries: Qatar, Macau SAR, China, and Luxembourg are in the 10% part of the range.
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2016). Statistical Language - Quantitative and Qualitative Data. Retrieved March 30, 2016, from http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/a3121120.nsf/home/statistical+language+-+quantitative+and+qualitative+data
Pasquali, V. (2015, November 1). The World's Richest and Poorest Countries. Global Finance Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/worlds-richest-and-poorest-countries
The World Bank Group. (2016). GDP per capita, PPP (current international $). Retrieved March 30, 2016, from http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?order=wbapi_data_value_2012+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc
