I was wondering how to interpret the statistic for Russia. My guess is that Russia produces a lot of oil and gas, but it trades at a heavy discount. PPP is a wa

I was wondering how to interpret the statistic for Russia. My guess is that Russia produces a lot of oil and gas, but it trades at a heavy discount. PPP is a way of ignoring the reasons for the discount. So maybe it’s saying that if the reasons for that discount were fixed (say, Russia makes peace) then they would get much better trade terms. But that’s a hypothetical scenario. In the real world, the geopolitical situation matters. For China, I believe the government controls the exchange rate, which results in intentionally selling Chinese goods at a discount? Hypothetically, if they let the currency rise then they’d have higher GDP, measured using actual exchange rates.