The World Bank updated GDP PPP data for the world's economies on Thursday. Russia is now fourth largest (ahead of Japan and Germany), while China is first.
I find the cognitive dissonance hilarious. One the one hand, they like to dismiss Russia as having no industry or economy to speak of. On the other hand, Russia is about to roll over the entire Europe with their unstoppable orc army.
We see basically the same arguments with China, though even the most deranged westoids get that China's GDP is high. But the same dissonant claims about their economy being about to collapse even though they are single handedly undermining US hegemony, their tech being behind even though they apparently live in a tech ruled surveillance state, etc.
The GDP of Russia isn't the PPP GDP of Russia. Internally Russian service and extraction sectors are cheap, which means intenrational PPP adjusted it is high. The GDP and non exports are much lower than Germanies and the indicator GDP PPP isn't that great to compare to the EWR.
Per person not too much changed, but the PPP GDP changed. However if it enables increase of productive facilities is an open question. If the service wage of a country decrease then that country will gain a short term boost in PPP GDP (till low income spending of service workers turn up in the statistics).
Isn't GDP PPP per capita the relevant metric? I guess I don't know how to think about GDP PPP at a certain point aren't we just measuring which country has more people
GDP PPP measures something closer to the real value being consumed. It's how big the economy is in a more tangible metric.
Adding per-capita to it answers where people are doing the best, economically, on average. And you're just going to get Luxembourg and Liechtenstein and Norway and Qatar at the top of that list. But a smaller country having a higher average is less significant than the same for a larger country. If you want to see how much clout a country's economy has, and maybe get a proxy for its tax base, you use GDP PPP. If you want to say "my economy could stretch further than your economy", you use GDP PPP.
How much the acknowledged income of the top 10% is higher than the lowest 10% (so 6,7 means the top 10% have nearly 7 times the income - not wealth! - of the lower 10% of incomes in terms of households of the country. Top income households are typically smaller - in terms of persons per household, not in terms of square meter per household -, so if you look at it from a per person view it will be even worse from our perspective)