Korea's Per-Capita GDP Set to Tumble
04 May, 2020
Korea's per-capita GDP based on purchasing-power parity is expected to plummet this season for the first time in 22 years due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Per-capita PPP gauges the purchasing power of each person considering inflation and currency value.
The International Monetary Fund forecast in a written report on Sunday that Korea's per-capita GDP based on PPP will decline 1.3 percent.
There were only 2 times when it fell -- during the oil crisis in 1980 (by 3.2 percent) and through the Asian financial meltdown in 1998 (by 5.8 percent).
The IMF forecast that a lot of major economies will be a whole lot worse affected, like the U.S. (6.4 percent), Japan (4.8 percent), Germany (seven percent) and France (7.4 percent). The only major economy where per-capita GDP is likely to rise is China, and then only by 0.9 percent.
/Yonhap
Earlier, German's Allianz forecast a still gloomier outlook. "Lockdowns for over fifty percent of the global population and GDP have hit the world such as a meteorite, pushing the global economy into its worst recession since World War II," or 3.3 percent, it predicted.
Sung Tae-yoon at Yonsei University said living conditions for Koreans can be tougher "because the coronavirus epidemic hit at a time when economic conditions were already bad."
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