GDP per capita is a very narrow indicator that does not come close to telling enough about the economic condition of a country.

Argentina seems to be going bankrupt and drown in enormous inflation every couple of years. That isn't the case with Chile. Based on this factor alone, Chile and Argentina aren't peers.

I don't know enough about Uruguay to judge.

Those were simply easy examples, there are plenty of non oecd countries that have higher levels of wealth than Chile.

> GDP per capita is a very narrow indicator that does not come close to telling enough about the economic condition of a country.

In what was us GDP per capita deficient, and what criteria would you propose exactly?

I won't propose any exact criteria, given that this is HN and I am in no mood for nitpicking games, which usually follow after a demand for something exact.

However, if I were considering investment from my own pocket, political and economic stability would play a much higher role for my decision making than GDP per capita. And Argentina would therefore be a big no-no, while Chile might make the cut.

Would you make a different choice?

> I won't propose any exact criteria, given that this is HN and I am in no mood for nitpicking games, which usually follow after a demand for something exact.

I understand that, you were the one who dismissed GDP per capita as an objective measurement of economic development.

The point I was making that the OECD exists to espouse a particular model of global economic organization and development, which is politically informed.

As to your question about investment, what might be beneficial to me as an investor isn’t necessarily the same as what is beneficial to a citizen of a particular country.

Economic situation of a country is a fairly complex picture that cannot be measured by a single scalar value. GDP per capita is not useless, but just one value among many. Same as you wouldn't try to measure an individual's overall health by their BMI alone. It tells you something, especially on the extreme ends of the distribution, but in the middle, not that much.

Yeah, OECD is very political. No disagreement about that.

But I would say that the correlation of "being attractive for FDI" and "having good standards of living among the general population" is rather high and given that FDI tends to predate said growth of standards of living, there actually may be causality.

Excluding resource-rich countries that grew fat on something that comes out of the earth, pretty much every country whose standards of living soared since, say, 1950, attracted a lot of FDI beforehand.

After all, the same things that attract investors (stability, low crime, high educational attainment, reliable electricity supply, rule of law) tend to be good for the citizens as well.

Some countries are known for falsifying statistics -- Argentina and China, for example. Chile is not. That means that if the official GDP/capita of Chile and Argentina are about the same, the real ones must be very different.

(And they aren't the same. Chile's is a lot higher at the moment.)

It was an example, stop getting bogged down in Argentina and look at Uruguay if you have an issue with their stats.