Countries by Gross domestic income (constant LCU)

Ranking 2024

Analysis

Gross domestic income in constant local currency units (LCU) measures the purchasing power of total incomes generated by domestic production, expressed in each country's own currency adjusted for inflation. According to the source definition, real gross domestic income (real GDI) measures the purchasing power of the total incomes generated by domestic production. It is a concept that exists in real terms only. When the terms of trade change there may be a significant divergence between the movements of GDP in volume terms and real GDI. The indicator code is NY.GDY.TOTL.KN, sourced from the World Bank World Development Indicators. This ranking covers 172 countries using 2024 data, with 169 of 172 countries (98.3%) reporting data from within the last seven years. All 172 datapoints are classified as official quality. Ten extreme outliers were identified at the 3-sigma threshold.

Iran (rank 1) records 74,366,785,355,602,100 constant LCU, a figure that dwarfs every other country in the dataset, driven in part by Iran's high-denomination rial. Indonesia (rank 2) follows at 12,632,821,827,960,000, and Viet Nam (rank 3) records 6,710,810,803,159,190. Korea (rank 4) stands at 2,235,320,235,543,230 and Colombia (rank 5) at 1,037,746,631,183,950. Japan, the world's fourth-largest economy by conventional measures, ranks 6th here at 558,236,025,548,348. High nominal LCU values at the top of this ranking are heavily influenced by each country's currency denomination rather than economic size alone.

Several counterintuitive placements appear in the middle of the ranking. Somalia (rank 7) at 295,491,078,034,705 sits above Chile (rank 9) at 220,653,698,217,576 and India (rank 11) at 185,394,752,444,319—countries with far larger economies by standard GDP measures. The United States ranks 28th at 24,744,520,093,249, and Germany ranks 61st at 3,589,193,011,152. Meanwhile, Palau ranks last at 230,243,914.63, with Marshall Islands (rank 171) at 230,931,312.55 and Kiribati (rank 170) at 359,880,768.82 rounding out the bottom. These placements are a direct function of each country's currency unit, not economic output.

This metric has a critical limitation: because values are expressed in each country's own constant local currency unit, rankings across countries are not economically meaningful. A country with a high-denomination currency will mechanically rank above a country with a low-denomination currency regardless of actual economic size. For example, Iran's rial-denominated figure places it first, while the United States dollar-denominated figure places the US 28th. Additionally, 25 of 172 countries (14.5%) reported data for a year other than 2024, introducing minor temporal inconsistency. The metric also does not capture cross-border income flows, informal economic activity, or wealth distribution within countries.

Methodology

Data source: World Bank World Development Indicators, indicator NY.GDY.TOTL.KN. Values are expressed in constant local currency units (LCU) for each country. The source definition states: real gross domestic income (real GDI) measures the purchasing power of the total incomes generated by domestic production. It is a concept that exists in real terms only. When the terms of trade change there may be a significant divergence between the movements of GDP in volume terms and real GDI. The ranking covers 172 countries. Data year is 2024, with 169 of 172 countries (98.3%) reporting data from within the last seven years and 147 of 172 (85.5%) reporting data for 2024 specifically. All datapoints are classified as official quality (100%). Ten extreme outliers were identified using a 3-sigma threshold. The average year-over-year change across the dataset is 5.8%. The value range spans from 230,243,914.63 (Palau) to 74,366,785,355,602,096 (Iran), a spread of over 32 billion percent. Because values are in non-comparable local currency units, cross-country comparisons are not economically valid.

Sources

• World Bank