Here goes Jack’s question:

During the lesson, you mentioned the Asian country/region with the highest GDP per capita, and you said it was Hong Kong in the lead. I thought it was Singapore but it got surpassed already.

Qatar comes first, then Macau, then Singapore. HK is at no. 7 behind the United Arab Emirates.

And this is my answer:

In terms of income/person, what Jack says is correct.

But it is also true that we consider several different aspects to evaluate income/persons over different countries. Here, what we have to remember is that the figure of income/person is designed to represent the physical quality of living and the production power of goods and services. So it is a kind of a proxy for production power of goods and services. That’s why we consider other factors in interpreting the numbers.

Anyway, for this reason, we exclude oil producing countries and too small countries.

So except quite a few high personal income oil producing countries and small one like Macau (population less than a million), we have only two high income countries of Hong Kong and Singapore.

It is true that Singapore’s personal income is higher than that of HK from early 2000s, but both countries’ personal incomes are still the highest level in Asia.

And also it needs to be pointed out that the majority of western economists believe that HK’s economic production power is not less than SG because of HK’ industry’s synergy with mainland China.