The wealth gap between rich and poor countries is actually 74% bigger than what the official income numbers tell you.
SSRN · March 13, 2026 · 6277578
Why it matters
Standard GDP only measures current earnings, but it ignores 'temporal arbitrage'—the ability to borrow against the future. Because people in wealthy countries have far better access to credit, they can pull future wealth into the present, creating a much larger divide in actual economic power than a simple paycheck would indicate.
From the abstract
Traditional measures of per capita income, including GDP per capita and PPP-adjusted variants, fail to account for a critical dimension of economic capacity: access to financing and financial infrastructure. This paper proposes a novel framework-Credit-Augmented Per Capita Income (CAPCI)-which adjusts nominal income by a Finance Access Multiplier (FAM) derived from household debt-to-income ratios and financial inclusion metrics. Using data from the World Bank, IMF, and academic sources, we demon