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Finance: What Does "Per Capita" Mean? 1808 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.
- Social Studies / Finance
- Finance / Financial Responsibility
- Life Skills / Personal Finance
- Finance / Finance Definitions
- Life Skills / Finance Definitions
- Finance / Personal Finance
- Courses / Finance Concepts
- Subjects / Finance and Economics
- Finance and Economics / Terms and Concepts
- Terms and Concepts / Tax
- Terms and Concepts / Accounting
- College and Career / Personal Finance
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
Full Transcript
- 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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