In 2025, Luxembourg was the country with the highest gross domestic product per capita in the world. Of the 20 listed countries, 13 are in Europe and five are in Asia, alongside the U.S. and Australia. There are no African or Latin American countries among the top 20. Correlation with high living standards While GDP is a useful indicator for measuring the size or strength of an economy, GDP per capita is much more reflective of living standards. For example, when compared to life expectancy or indices such as the Human Development Index or the World Happiness Report, there is a strong overlap - 14 of the 20 countries on this list are also ranked among the 20 happiest countries in 2024, and all 20 have "very high" HDIs. Misleading metrics? GDP per capita figures, however, can be misleading, and to paint a fuller picture of a country's living standards then one must look at multiple metrics. GDP per capita figures can be skewed by inequalities in wealth distribution, and in countries such as those in the Middle East, a relatively large share of the population lives in poverty while a smaller number live affluent lifestyles.

GDP per capita growth (annual %) in European Union was reported at 0.21373 % in 2023, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. European Union - GDP per capita growth (annual %) - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on June of 2025.

The Gross Domestic Product per capita in European Union was last recorded at 34859.60 US dollars in 2024. The GDP per Capita in European Union is equivalent to 276 percent of the world's average. This dataset provides the latest reported value for - European Union GDP Per Capita - plus previous releases, historical high and low, short-term forecast and long-term prediction, economic calendar, survey consensus and news.

In the 16 years leading up to the First World War, the growth of GDP per capita varied across Europe, from growth rates of just six percent in the Netherlands, to 37 percent in Denmark. Of the major powers, France and Germany experienced the largest growth in this period, at 32 percent growth each, while Britain's growth was roughly half of this. It is important to remember, that the GDP per capita, along with economic development and industrialization, varied across Europe in this time period. For these reasons, Central and Eastern Europe had a higher overall GDP per capita growth rate than Western Europe, although Western Europe was much more advanced due to where its economy was in 1897.

At the turn of the 20th century, industrialization in Western Europe and North America saw new countries emerge (or return) as major economic powers. Germany (established in 1871) and the United States were the two countries that began to challenge the established powers such as Britain and the Netherlands on an industrial scale, while France's invigorated banking system compensated for its slow rate of industrialization. This period also saw Scandinavian countries catch up with modernization rates observed in other Western European countries; the wealth of natural resources, increased industrial output, and strong shipping networks combined to allow GDP per capita to grow at rates similar to the United States and France and Germany.

Between 1970 and 1913, GDP per capita in the three emerging regions roughly doubled, outpacing growth in countries considered economic and industrial "leaders" for most of the 1800s. While Britain had been the leading global superpower for most of the 19th century and still maintained healthy economic growth in the given period, the rise of Germany and the U.S. at this time would (and, later, the Soviet Union) go on to shape global economic development over the subsequent decades.

The period between 1950 and 1973, known as the "Golden Age of capitalism" in the west, was the most prosperous period in Europe's modern history. The economic boom in the post-war period saw GDP grow by an average of almost four percent in Western and Eastern Europe, and almost five percent in the south. Although the west was the most technologically advanced of the three, this period did see a significant amount of catching up in the other two regions, whose rapid industrialization and urbanization changed the lives of its citizens forever. Recession hits the west The recession of 1973-1975 brought this economic and industrial growth to an end, however, as conflict in the Middle East saw oil prices skyrocket. Virtually all of Western Europe's industrial powers went into recession, and this had a detrimental knock-on effect in Poland and Romania due to their indebtedness to the west. While the recession ended in most countries by 1976, factors such as unemployment, inflation, and industrial output often remained high until the 1980s. The 1980s and 1990s also saw the rapid economic growth of countries such as Ireland and Finland. However, growth was much slower in these decades for most western economies than it had been in the 1950s and1960s. Collapse of communism The 1970s marked the beginning of the economic decline in Eastern Europe, as the command economies of the East Bloc could not maintain pace with the capitalist west and failed to adapt to the challenges that emerged in this period. Communism in Eastern Europe eventually ended around the early 1990s, and the largest power, the Soviet Union, was dissolved. This resulted in severe economic hardships in the former communist states, and recovery in the former-Soviet states did not begin until the late 1990s. The effects of communism's collapse in Europe was so severe that GDP in the east actually fell by an average of 0.9 percent per year between 1973 and 1998

Graph and download economic data for Constant GDP per capita for the Euro Area (NYGDPPCAPKDEMU) from 1960 to 2024 about Euro Area, Europe, per capita, and GDP.

The Gross Domestic Product per capita in European Union was last recorded at 54290.99 US dollars in 2024, when adjusted by purchasing power parity (PPP). The GDP per Capita, in European Union, when adjusted by Purchasing Power Parity is equivalent to 306 percent of the world's average. This dataset provides the latest reported value for - European Union GDP Per Capita Ppp - plus previous releases, historical high and low, short-term forecast and long-term prediction, economic calendar, survey consensus and news.

We publish our out-of-sample estimates on historical GDP per capita levels between the years 1300 and 2000 together with the collected source data on countries and regions in a comprehensive dataset comprising 5,690 observations (1,313 source data observations, and 4,377 out-of-sample estimates). All references to the source data are provided in the manuscript.Locations refer to NUTS-2 regions in Europe (2021 edition), metro- and micropolitan statistical areas for the United States, metropolitan areas for Canada, and regions of similar size for other countries, e.g. oblasts in Russia. For countries, we use ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country codes.The column GDPpc is denoted in 2011 USD PPP, matching the unit provided in the Maddison project. The column flag describes whether the value in column GDPpc is taken from source data (see manuscript for references) or an out-of-sample estimate. If it is an out-of-sample estimate, the columns GDPpc_lower and GDPpc_upper provide 90 percent confidence intervals obtained by bootstrapping.The code to generate all estimates will be published soon to ensure reproducibility of results.

In 1950, GDP per capita in Western Europe (29 countries) was just 48 percent of GDP per capita in the U.S. The post-war economic boom from 1950 to 1973 was the most prosperous period in Western Europe's history, and GDP per capita more than doubled in this period, reaching 69 percent of the U.S.' rate. Due to several economic crises in Europe in the following decades, growth rates in Western Europe remained relatively stable. Still, they did not reach the same heights as seen during the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism.

In contrast, the U.S. had been harder hit than Western Europe by the economic difficulties of the 1970s and 1980s, but the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 coincided with one of the most successful decades in U.S. history, with the economy thriving in the 1990s. For Western Europe, the fall of communism had a knock-on effect that limited growth in the early 1990s, although GDP per capita compared to the U.S. was fairly similar to 1973's rate (albeit lower) at 66 percent.

In 2023 the real gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States increased by 2.5 percent compared to 2022. This rate of annual growth indicates a return to economy normalcy after 2020 saw a dramatic decline in the GDP growth rate due to the the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and high growth in 2021.

What does GDP growth mean?

Essentially, the annual GDP of the U.S. is the monetary value of all goods and services produced within the country over a given year. On the surface, an increase in GDP therefore means that more goods and services have been produced between one period than another. In the case of annualized GDP, it is compared to the previous year. In 2023, for example, the U.S. GDP grew 2.5 percent compared to 2022.

Countries with highest GDP growth rate

Although the United States has by far the largest GDP of any country, it does not have the highest GDP growth, nor the highest GDP at purchasing power parity. In 2021, Libya had the highest growth in GDP, growing more than 177 percent compared to 2020. Furthermore, Luxembourg had the highest GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, a better measure of living standards than nominal or real GDP.

The statistic shows the growth of the real gross domestic product (GDP) in Switzerland from 2020 to 2024, with projections up until 2030. GDP is the total value of all goods and services produced in a country in a year. It is considered to be a very important indicator of the economic strength of a country and a change in it is a sign of economic growth. In 2024, the GDP in Switzerland grew by about 1.27 percent compared to the previous year. Switzerland's economy Switzerland holds one of the steadiest and secure economies in the world, enticing international investors as well as the world’s richest to deposit their money within the country. Switzerland’s relatively low population is highly educated and specialized in the workforce, something that essentially leads to a prosperous economy. In addition to its workforce earning some of the highest salaries in the world, Switzerland maintained one of the lowest unemployment rates in the Europe, despite being affected by the 2008 financial crisis. With higher wages and specialized jobs, economic growth as well as production within the country continued to grow, a fact most evident through values of GDP. As a result, Switzerland’s gross domestic product per capita was ranked among one of the highest in the world. However, economic growth did not occur too rapidly and wages were set at a reasonable controllable amount, which allowed Switzerland to maintain a low inflation rate.

The gross domestic product of the United Kingdom was around 2.56 trillion British pounds, an increase when compared to the previous year, when UK GDP amounted to about 2.54 trillion pounds. The significant drop in GDP visible in 2020 was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the smaller declines in 2008 and 2009 because of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. Low growth problem in the UK Despite growing by 0.9 percent in 2024, and 0.4 percent in 2023 the UK economy is not that much larger than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since recovering from a huge fall in GDP in the second quarter of 2020, the UK economy has alternated between periods of contraction and low growth, with the UK even in a recession at the end of 2023. While economic growth picked up somewhat in 2024, GDP per capita is lower than it was in 2022, following two years of negative growth. UK's global share of GDP falling As of 2024, the UK had the sixth-largest economy in the world, behind the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and India. Among European nations, this meant that the UK currently has the second-largest economy in Europe, although the economy of France, Europe's third-largest economy, is of a similar size. The UK's global economic ranking will likely fall in the coming years, however, with the UK's share of global GDP expected to fall from 2.16 percent in 2025 to 2.02 percent by 2029.  

Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is a measure of economic production, which takes the entire output of a national economy during a year and divides it by the population of that country. In the European Union, Luxembourg, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Austria come out on top as the countries which produced the most per capita in 2024. Europe's richest countries benefit from multinational companies Many criticisms have been made of using GDP per capita as away to judge a country's economic wealth in recent years, as global capital flows have come to distort the statistics and to give a warped impression of different countries' wealth. This is most notably the case for Ireland and for Luxembourg, which while certainly high-income countries, have experienced dramatic booms in their GDP over the past two decades due to the accounting practices of the large multinational corporations which have their European headquarters in these member states, such as Facebook and Apple in Dublin, and Amazon in Luxembourg. Will the poorest countries converge towards the EU average? At the bottom of the list, two of the most recent member states of the EU, Romania and Bulgaria, come last in terms of GDP per capita. Whether these countries will be able to capitalize on their relatively low-wages to spur economic growth and experience the convergence towards the older member states of the union shown by countries such as Estonia, Czechia, and Lithuania, remains a pressing issue for these poorer member states.

In 1913, the GDP per capita of the United States grew to more than double what it had been in 1870. The influx of migration to the United States allowed for an industrial boom, and high levels of innovation and expansion meant that the U.S. was at the forefront of technological advancements. High levels of exports also brought significant wealth to the country, as the U.S. extended its sphere of influence across the Americas and into Western Europe. Although a severe recession did halt economic growth in the 1870s and 1880s, the decades that followed saw rapid growth, and living standards and infrastructure improved to levels similar to Europe. Growth in Western Europe was comparatively lower than in the U.S. but was still strong throughout this period, particularly in France, Germany, and Scandinavia.

The study examines how the recent economic crisis and the related unfavourable economic features affect poverty. As economic crisis is usually associated with many economic and social problems, it tries to determine to what extent it influences poverty. The paper attempts to prove that economic recession contributes not only to the impoverishment of a significant section of society, but also increases the depth of poverty significantly. If the research supports this hypothesis, it is worth examining to what extent one percent economic growth or economic decline can decrease or increase the rate of the poor and the depth of poverty. Besides the effect of economic growth on the given area, the paper also analyses the effect of the economic growth of the neighbouring areas. The initial hypothesis states that the economic growth of the neighbouring regions can also alleviate poverty. As for spatial effects, spatial autocorrelation is examined in the average income level to reveal how the economic growth of the neighbouring areas affects a given region. The study examines Northern Hungary, one of the most backward regions in Hungary (based on GDP per capita). Eurostat (2010) reports this region is among the poorest twenty regions within the European Union (based on GDP per capita PPP, Northern Hungary is the 259th among the 271 regions of the European Union).

In 2022, Germany's gross domestic product (GDP) amounted to 3,867.05 billion euros. Germany is thus among the leading five countries in the world GDP ranking.

International standing

Germany’s economy is not only one of the largest worldwide, it is also the largest in Europe and predicted to be among the countries with the largest GDP by the year 2030. Additionally, Germany is among the 20 countries with the largest gross domestic product per capita, and it is one of the leading exporters and importers, only surpassed by China and the United States in both cases. Subsequently, it also reports one of the highest trade surpluses worldwide.

Employment

Germany’s national debt amounts to about 60 percent of GDP and is steadily decreasing. It also reports one of the lowest unemployment rates in the European Union. All signs seem to point to a very bright future for Germany’s economy. However, the country has been struggling with skilled labor shortages for a while and many companies are desperately looking for apprentices. This is partly due to very low population growth but also the rising unpopularity of apprenticeships.

Gross domestic product (GDP) is defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as standard measure of the value of final goods and services produced by a country during a period minus the value of imports. The projected GDP in Million EUR for the EU-28 Member States was extracted from GEM-E3 model and disaggregated at NUTS 2 level. The GDP per capita is the country or regional total annual projected GDP derived from GEM-E3 divided by the total annual projected population from EUROPOP2010. The higher the value of the indicator, the higher the productivity per person. The indicator is given in million euros per capita (person).

Between 1900 and 1950, Scandinavian countries saw the largest growth in GDP per capita in Europe, more than doubling between 1913 and 1950. In comparison, growth rates were much lower in Western Europe, and lower still in East-Central Europe. From 1913 (the year before the First World War) until the end of the Second World War's recovery period in 1950, Western Europe's GDP per capita grew by just 43 percent, while East-Central Europe's figure increased by just 26 percent.

Despite the significance of economic freedom in tourism dynamics, especially from a spatial standpoint, its nuanced influence remains unexplored mainly in current research. To fill this gap, our study introduces a novel spatial panel data analysis to investigate how various components of the economic freedom index affect tourist arrivals in 41 European countries from 2005 to 2018. By employing this innovative approach, we uncover the complex interdependencies between economic freedom and tourism and highlight the significance of regional economic characteristics on the tourism sector’s health. Our findings reveal that a one percent increase in GDP per capita of neighboring nations corresponds to a 0.4 percent increase in tourist arrivals to the home country. In comparison, a similar rise in neighboring countries’ prices leads to a 0.4 percent decrease in inbound tourists. Most economic freedom variables, including the Business Freedom Index, Investment Freedom Index, Labor Freedom Index, Trade Freedom Index, and Government Integrity Index, demonstrate statistically significant positive effects. However, a one percent increase in the Monetary Freedom Index of neighboring countries results in a 0.747 percent reduction in homebound tourists. Notably, enhancements in the country’s and neighboring countries’ Investment Freedom Index and Government Integrity Index contribute to increased arrivals. This research contributes to the broader understanding of economic policies’ impact on tourism, offering valuable insights for policymakers aiming to leverage economic freedom for tourism development. The application of a spatial panel data approach marks a significant methodological advancement in tourism studies, opening new avenues for analyzing economic influences on tourism at a regional level.