I said: "look at a list of the top 10 large countries by GDP per capita (I picked a cutoff of 6 million people to exclude small banking and oil states which ar

I said: "look at a list of the top 10 large countries by GDP per capita (I picked a cutoff of 6 million people to exclude small banking and oil states which aren't really generalizable)" You said: "Someone could strike gold/oil in one of those bottom ten countries, making a few people very rich, thus raising average GDP." I'm open to counter-examples, but offhand I would say no; that can only happen in small countries. That's why I limited my comments explicitly to large countries. :) (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that it was late, and I didn't properly filter the list of the bottom 10 countries by size. Liberia and CAR are small, and should have been replaced by Mali and Togo.)