What is per capita income?

What is per capita income?
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India was 169th in terms of per capita income in the world. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), the country\'s per capita income grew 7.65 per cent to $5,833 in 2014, against $5,418 in the previous year. The country\'s GDP crossed $2 trillion in 2014, compared to $1.86 trillion in the previous year. India crossed the $2-trillion mark in seven years after crossing $1 trillion in 60 years.

RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan on Wednesday sought to contextualise his "one-eyed king" remarks about India's growth and said the country has a long way to go before it claims to have arrived. Stating that the per-capita income of Indians remains lowest among BRICS, Dr Rajan said, "We have a long way to go before we can claim we have arrived. We need to repeat this performance (economic growth) for 20 years before we can give each Indian a decent livelihood."
Per capita income is total resources/total population. Per capita income is often used to measure an area's average income. This is used to compare the wealth of one population with those of others. Per capita income is often used to measure a country's standard of living. It is usually expressed in terms of a commonly used international currency such as the euro or United States dollar, and is useful because it is widely known, is easily calculable from readily available gross domestic product (GDP) and population estimates, and produces a useful statistic for comparison of wealth between sovereign territories. This helps to ascertain a country's development status. It is one of the three measures for calculating the Human Development Index of a country. Per capita income or average income measures the average income earned per person in a given area (city, region, country, etc.) in a specified year. It is calculated by dividing the area's total income by its total population, explains Wikipedia.
The Gross Domestic Product per capita in India was last recorded at $1,262.64 in 2014. The GDP per capita in India is equivalent to 10 per cent of the world's average. GDP per capita in India averaged $477.5 from 1960 until 2014, reaching an all-time high of $1262.64 in 2014 and a record low of $228.34 in 1960, according to http://www.tradingeconomics.com.
India was 169th in terms of per capita income in the world. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), the country's per capita income grew 7.65 per cent to $5,833 in 2014, against $5,418 in the previous year. The country's GDP crossed $2 trillion in 2014, compared to $1.86 trillion in the previous year. India crossed the $2-trillion mark in seven years after crossing $1 trillion in 60 years.

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