Panama will soon overtake Costa Rica and Venezuela in GDP per head.
In 1998 Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand saw their real GDP per head shrink by an average of 11%.
Americans would still be much richer, of course, with a GDP per head more than four times that in China.
The poorest province, Guizhou, has a GDP per head of $280, on a par with Bangladesh or Yemen.
One of the supposedly booming BRIC countries, Brazil, has seen its GDP per head increase by only 2.3% per year since 2003, barely any faster than Japan's.
But this spectacular convergence went into reverse: by 2010, Japan's GDP per head had fallen to 76 per cent of US levels.
However, the relationship between prices and GDP per head can be used to estimate the short-term fair value of a currency relative to others.
Thirty years ago, says Petar Filipic, a Croatian economist, GDP per head in Zagreb was only 10% bigger than in the gap has widened to over 100%.
But Australia has also had one of the biggest increases in population; its GDP per head has grown no faster than Japan's over this period.
Since independence in 1990, after a 23-year war of liberation, Namibia's GDP per head has doubled in real terms, yet the poverty rate, according to the World Bank, is the same.
Professors Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi argued that the level of GDP per head was far from the best measure of material living standards in the national accounts.
Launching the latest southern revisionist tract in Naples this week, one of its authors said that so long as the south has a GDP per head 70% of the north, a you cana t talk about a united italy.a.
