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Finance: What Does "Per Capita" Mean? 1805 Views


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Description:

What does “per capita” mean? Economic stats are usually described saying “per capita.” This just means per person, so they are given as an average per person. Income per capita describes the average income of a place on a per person basis.

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Transcript

00:00

finance a la shmoop. what does per-capita mean? well there's poor capita yeah this

00:09

guy, how would you like to be named capita and then there's per capita which [man sits under a tree]

00:13

just means well technically per head. yep comes from Latin like oh so many

00:18

things salsa dressing and dancing among others, the word decapitation comes to [dancing feet]

00:25

mind. like what happens when those flying human taxi drones get too far to the

00:31

left or when King Henry got tired of a wife. so if that happened often it had [helicopter prop]

00:36

throw off the per capita calculations. and same deal if we suddenly had a lot

00:41

of two-headed people being born like the aliens in men in black and whole bunch

00:46

other Hollywood movies. per capita is a useful metric in a bunch of financial

00:50

calculations. a common set is GDP or gross domestic product per capita .like

00:58

if you have a ton of GDP say ten trillion dollars from your country [100 dollar bill]

01:03

whateverstan, if you only have a million people that's a ton of production

01:07

productivity. but if you're say China with well over a billion people well

01:12

then it's a much lower GDP per capita. the calculations get quoted when talking

01:18

about things like cell phone monthly subscriptions, computer ownership or [people crowd around a cell phone]

01:23

particularly rollicking house parties. so yeah the notion of per capita is pretty

01:28

important but don't stress if you're not an expert yet. it's a nothing to lose

01:33

your head over. [man carries head]

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