What are the poorest countries in Asia from top to bottom?

riotgrrl

This depends on what measure you use. For instance, using GDP at purchasing power parity (as used by the IMF and World Bank, explained by Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita ), Hong Kong comes out top, with Qatar being the wealthiest sovereign nation and Yemen the poorest (see the link for a full list). Using nominal GDP puts Qatar top again, but Afghanistan bottom. On the other hand, looking at the percentage of the population living on less than $2 a day puts South Korea top and Bangladesh bottom (but this list doesn't include Japan). Perhaps a more useful measure is the Human Development Index, compiled by the UN, which takes into account a large number of factors including poverty, literacy, life expectancy, etc. This puts Japan top and Yemen bottom (but Afghanistan and Iraq are not included in the list). All these figures, for almost every country in the world, are available on Wikipedia. However, North Korea is not included as there are no reliable statistics. May 18 06, 5:09 PM