Other measures

What's the best way of measuring contributions to the asian tsunami? The easiest one is in absolute terms, comparing dollar figures. On this measure, Japan is the most generous, followed by the US and then Norway - though this is expected to change tomorrow, with Germany taking the top spot and Australia - a country with less than a tenth of America's population - pushing the US into fourth place. An alternative method which gives a better idea of generosity is to correct for population, giving dollars per capita. A table of how the various donors stack up on this measure can be found here, and it is less than flattering to some nations that like to think of themselves as generous (including New Zealand). A third method is to compare donations by donor government's ability to pay, as measured by GDP. In response to a request from NZ Political Comments I was planning to do a quick table of this using the figures from Wikipedia, but their GDP figures look a little dubious (especially for NZ). Fortunately, an anonymous commenter has saved me the effort of researching better ones and effectively done it for me. So here's the comparison, using their figures for GDP, and updated with the latest figures for donations:

Country	Aid (US$ millions)	GDP (US$ billions)	% of GDP
Kuwait	100	41.46	0.2412
Qatar	25	17.54	0.1425
Australia	764	571	0.1338
Norway	182	172	0.1058
NZ	47.6	85	0.0560
Denmark	75	167	0.0449
Sweden	80	238	0.0336
Germany	674	2271	0.0297
Austria	66.16	245	0.0270
Finland	30	142	0.0211
UK	242	1666	0.0145
Japan	500	3582	0.0140
Ireland	13.5	116	0.0116
Saudi Arabia	30	288	0.0104
Switzerland	23.8	239	0.00996
Canada	95	959	0.00991
Taiwan	50.25	528.6	0.00951
Netherlands	36	461	0.00781
Spain	68	886	0.00767
Italy	95	1550	0.00613
Portugal	11	182	0.00604
South Korea	50	858	0.00583
Belgium	16.32	299.1	0.00546
France	66	1661	0.00397
USA	350	10880	0.00322

(South Korea's GDP figure from the CIA World Factbook)

As for usefulness, there's obviously a strong correlation between this and the per-capita rankings, which you'd expect, as richer countries can obviously give more per head. The real difference is in the bottom of the table, where the US drops about four places because, frankly, it can afford to give more.

Update (06/01/05): Updated Germany and Australia.

Update 2 (07/01/05): Updated Saudi Arabia.

Update 3 (15/01/05): Added Kuwait, Taiwan and Belgium, and updated Austria. Unfortunately the "one China" policy corrupts even the CIA factbook, so Taiwan's GDP figure (source here) may not be entirely comparable.

Update 4 (18/01/05): Updated New Zealand's contribution.