What is Poor?

I been thinking lately about the fact that Estonia doesn't really seem poor, even though by every measure it's the poorest country I've ever lived in. Of course, in many ways it's obviously not a wealthy country, with aged infrastructure and abandoned buildings here and there, but there's little evidence of poverty that I remember seeing in places like China and Russia or even in the US for that matter.

Using GDP per capita as an approximation of wealth, it is estimated that GDP per capita in the US is about 2.5 times that in Estonia. But what does that really look like? Part of the problem of visualizing it is that wealth varies so much within a country. I've spent most of my time in Tallinn, the wealthiest city in Estonia. So I found statistics on the GDP contribution of various metropolitan areas in the US and Europe and compared them and found some interesting numbers.

As a whole, Estonia's GDP per capita is similar to that of cities along the Texas-Mexico border. So it's poor, but not something that would be unfamiliar to Americans. By itself, Tallinn is comparable in wealth to Yuba City. Once again poor, but something Americans are accustomed to. I think that's why I don't really see it. I've been to cities in the US that are of comparable wealth, so it doesn't seem that much different.

Another difference in Estonia is that wealth is more evenly distributed, so there's fewer people that are super wealthy, but there are also fewer people that are a lot poorer than the general population. In fact, I've not seen a single beggar since coming to Tallinn. That said, I've also seen very little expressions of great wealth with the exceptions of tourists in the old town.

Anyway, after finding these numbers, I became fascinated by how much wealth is actually in a lot of Eastern European cities, so what follows is a list of major Eastern European cities and a US metro area to which they are comparable.

Prague, Czechia - Sacramento, CA
Warsaw, Poland - Rochester, NY
Bratislava, Slovakia - Charleston, SC
Ljubljana, Slovenia - Fort Collins, CO
Berlin, Germany - Winchester, VA
Zagreb, Croatia - Riverside, CA
Budapest, Hungary - Eugene, OR
Tallinn, Estonia - Yuba City, CA
Riga, Latvia - Pueblo, CO
Bucharest, Romania - Ocala, FL
Vilnius, Lithuania - Prescott, AZ

While these comparisons might seem surprising, it's important to remember, these are the wealthiest cities within their respective countries (except Berlin). In most cases, the rest of the country was so poor they could not be compared to any US metro area. In case you were curious, Asheville sits between Budapest and Tallinn.