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Gross national income (GNI) per capita

In constant international-$ – UNDP

What you should know about this indicator

  • Gross national income (GNI) is a measure of the total income earned by residents of a country or region each year. It is calculated as GDP plus net income received from abroad, plus taxes (minus subsidies) on production. GNI per capita is GNI divided by population.
  • This GNI per capita indicator provides information on economic growth and income levels from 1990.
  • This data is adjusted for inflation and for differences in living costs between countries.
  • This data is expressed in at 2021 prices.
  • Higher GNI per capita typically signals greater average command over resources, but says little about distribution, non‑market production or environmental costs.
  • Subject to revisions when PPP benchmarks are updated; omits remittances/leakages in informal economies; exchange‑rate mis‑measurement can bias cross‑country comparisons.

How is this data described by its producer - UNDP?

UNDP relies on IMF (2023), UNDESA (2023), United Nations Statistics Division (2023), World Bank (2023).

The World Bank's 2023 World Development Indicators database contains estimates of GNI per capita in constant 2021 purchasing power parity (PPP) terms for many countries. For countries missing this indicator (entirely or partly), the Human Development Report Office calculates it by converting GNI per capita in local currency from current to constant terms using two steps. First, the value of GNI per capita in current terms is converted into PPP terms for the base year (2021). Second, a time series of GNI per capita in 2021 PPP constant terms is constructed by applying the real growth rates to the GNI per capita in PPP terms for the base year. The real growth rate is implied by the ratio of the nominal growth of GNI per capita in current local currency terms to the GDP deflator.

For several countries without a value of GNI per capita in constant 2021 PPP terms for 20 22 reported in the World Development Indicators database, real growth rates of GDP per capita available in the World Development Indicators database or in the International Monetary Fund's Economic Outlook database are applied to the most recent GNI values in constant PPP terms.

Official PPP conversion rates are produced by the International Comparison Program, whose surveys periodically collect thousands of prices of matched goods and services in many countries. The last round of this exercise refers to 2021 and covered 176 economies.

Gross national income (GNI) per capita
In constant international-$ – UNDP
Average income per person earned by residents of a country or region, including income earned abroad. This data is adjusted for inflation and for differences in living costs between countries.
Source
UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 7, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1990–2023
Unit
international-$ in 2021 prices

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

UNDP, Human Development Report – Human Development Report

Artificial intelligence (AI) has broken into a dizzying gallop. While AI feats grab headlines, they privilege technology in a make-believe vacuum, obscuring what really matters: people's choices.

The choices that people have and can realize, within ever expanding freedoms, are essential to human development, whose goal is for people to live lives they value and have reason to value. A world with AI is flush with choices the exercise of which is both a matter of human development and a means to advance it.

Going forward, development depends less on what AI can do—not on how human-like it is perceived to be—and more on mobilizing people's imaginations to reshape economies and societies to make the most of it. Instead of trying vainly to predict what will happen, the 2025's Human Development Report asks what choices can be made so that new development pathways for all countries dot the horizon, helping everyone have a shot at thriving in a world with AI.

For more details, refer to https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/documentation-and-downloads

Retrieved on
May 7, 2025
Retrieved from
https://hdr.undp.org/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2025. Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI. New York.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has broken into a dizzying gallop. While AI feats grab headlines, they privilege technology in a make-believe vacuum, obscuring what really matters: people's choices.

The choices that people have and can realize, within ever expanding freedoms, are essential to human development, whose goal is for people to live lives they value and have reason to value. A world with AI is flush with choices the exercise of which is both a matter of human development and a means to advance it.

Going forward, development depends less on what AI can do—not on how human-like it is perceived to be—and more on mobilizing people's imaginations to reshape economies and societies to make the most of it. Instead of trying vainly to predict what will happen, the 2025's Human Development Report asks what choices can be made so that new development pathways for all countries dot the horizon, helping everyone have a shot at thriving in a world with AI.

For more details, refer to https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/documentation-and-downloads

Retrieved on
May 7, 2025
Retrieved from
https://hdr.undp.org/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2025. Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI. New York.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Gross national income (GNI) per capita”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from UNDP, Human Development Report. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.html [online resource] (archived on March 25, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

UNDP, Human Development Report (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Gross national income (GNI) per capita – UNDP – In constant international-$” [dataset]. UNDP, Human Development Report, “Human Development Report” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.html (archived on March 25, 2026).

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Data API

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gross-national-income-per-capita-undp.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear