Cecille's Creativity

This depends on how you measure a country's wealth. One way is to work out the wealth of each person in a country, supposing that all the wealth were shared out equally. Measured in this way, the wealthiest countries are a few Arab states in southwest Asia.

The richest Arab states are those with small populations but huge supplies of valuable oil. Profits from the sale of oil have helped such states to improve their standard of living. Most of these states are on the Persian Gulf.

The states with the most wealth per head of population in the early 1980s were the United Arab Emirates. Altogether these had fewer than one million people. If all wealth were shared equally among their people, in 1980 each person would have had $30,070.