ECLAC Releases Estimates of Purchasing Power Parities for Countries of the Region

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has released the results for the 39 countries of the region that jointly participated in the International Comparison Programme (ICP), Round 2011. The report shows that the average GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) for Latin America is estimated equal to 12,443 dollars while for Caribbean is 16,351 dollars.


ICP implementation was led and coordinated by the ICP Global Office, hosted by the World Bank, in partnership with regional agencies, ECLAC among them. This Programme is a worldwide statistics initiative aimed at collecting comparable prices and compiling detailed expenditure data of countries' Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with the final objective of estimating Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) of the participating countries.

PPPs are important in international comparison of GDP data because they are defined as both currency converters and spatial price deflators. Therefore, comparing countries' GDP in real terms (divided by PPPs) controls for both the differences in prices and the exchange rates, and makes a comparison of volume data possible and effective.

Regional results show that, in Latin America, Uruguay has the highest real GDP per capita based on PPPs (17,343 dollars), followed by Venezuela (16,965 dollars), Panama (15,369 dollars) and Brazil (14,639 dollars).

The lowest values are recorded for Haiti (1,557 dollars), Nicaragua (4,111 dollars), Honduras (4,349 dollars) and Bolivia (5,557 dollars).

The average GDP per capita in PPPs for Latin America is estimated equal to 12,443 dollars.

Among the Caribbean countries, Bermuda shows the highest real GDP per capita (54,899 dollars), followed by Cayman Islands (49,686 dollars) and Aruba (36,017 dollars), while the lowest values are estimated for Belize (8,212 dollars) and Jamaica (8,329 dollars).

The average GDP per capita in PPPs for the participating Caribbean countries is equal to 16,351 dollars.

At the global level, the real GDP per capita for all participating countries is about 13,500 dollars, with the highest level found in the Eurostat-OECD region (over 33,000 dollars), and the lowest in Africa (slightly above 4,000 dollars).

The ICP was established in 1968, but comparisons of final expenditure on GDP have been completed at irregular intervals, given the complexity of the exercise, until the last Round, which had 2005 as reference year.

Over 190 countries participated in the present 2011 Round, whose activities have been carried out over almost five years, starting from 2009. Twenty-two countries from the Caribbean and seventeen from Latin America jointly participated in this Round. In addition to them, Chile and Mexico also integrated this Programme but as part of the Eurostat-OECD region.

ECLAC is releasing today the main regional results, simultaneously with the World Bank's publication of the main global results of the ICP Round 2011 for all participating regions. The global results can be found in the following link: http://icp.worldbank.org/.