Top 10 Richest Countries in Asia

I'm the same, I get to the B's and I'm like Bhutan, Burundi and I always forget Brunei

Yes, how disappointed you must have been when it turned out to be second on the list.

I too, wished the movie It took place in Singapore. Unfortunately, they just picked some random town in the US.

(Excluding the 5 of them that are not).

oil and what kogatora said.

It's because they're using PPP. Israel in reality has a higher GDP per capita than the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Brunei, South Korea, Kuwait, Bahrain, Taiwan, or Saudi Arabia, but because it's a relatively more expensive place to live when you adjust for PPP then its economy gets unrealistically deflated. A lot of this I imagine has to do with out-of-control housing prices in Israel. Nominal GDP is not affected at all by the vagaries of housing market bubbles blowing up the price of rent. And perhaps counter-intuitively if there is a massive housing market crash in Israel, substantially lowering housing prices (but probably badly damaging the economy), it's PPP GDP per capita could go UP because PPP would calculate that shekels suddenly became worth more, even though everywhere else they would be worth the same

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Brunei are very cheap countries to live in so their numbers go up.

Look again. Singapore is #1. Which is, to me anyway, as surprising as a version of this where they don't make the cut.

overstated but agreed in principle. PPP has *something* to do with real life... it's just a very bad way to measure total GDP.

Japan: very high HDI, well-developed and generally prosperous. But the quiz uses PPP and many cities in Japan, most notably Tokyo, have a very high cost of living. So they get docked using this magical figuring. Another thing to consider is that Japan has extremely high income equality, relatively speaking.. so even next to some countries with higher GDP per capita Japan usually has less wealth concentrated at the top and fewer citizens living in poverty.

China: their economy has been growing by leaps and bound and they're about 100x better off now than they were under Mao and before adopting some free market economic reforms, but certainly they are still quite far from being a "rich" country. Maybe in another 2-3 decades, though I suspect that their one-child policy is going to start having a serious dire impact on their fortunes within the same time frame as they start running out of younger people to grow the economy and support their aging population.