Poorest Countries in the World: The Ranking and How It's Measured

Judging how poor a country is takes more than a glance at its income: it takes indicators, and each one tells its own part of the story. The World Bank ranks nations by income, the UNDP ranks them by human development, and the two rankings look alike without quite matching.

How Economists Measure Poverty Between Countries

Under the World Bank’s classification in force from July 2026 to June 2027, a country enters the “low income” band when its gross national income per capita (calculated with the Atlas method) stays at $1,175 or less in 2025. The next band, “lower-middle income,” spans $1,176 to $4,635. The classification is updated every year, and movement between bands is real: in the 2026-2027 update, Togo moved out of the low-income group.

Income per capita alone isn’t enough, though. The UNDP calculates the Human Development Index (HDI) by combining three dimensions with a geometric mean: health, measured through life expectancy at birth; education, measured through the average years of schooling adults have completed and the years of schooling children are expected to receive; and standard of living, measured through gross national income per capita. A country can have a low GDP and a relatively less low HDI if public spending genuinely reaches health care and schools — or the other way around.

Practical example: comparing two countries on GDP per capita alone can give a partial picture. If a country has a lower-middle income but invests in public hospitals and schools, its HDI can end up higher than income alone would suggest: that’s why international agencies use both indicators together, not one in place of the other.

The Ranking by GDP Per Capita

According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database, Yemen has the lowest nominal GDP per capita in the world in 2026, at around $384. South Sudan follows close behind, at around $488, and Burundi at around $546. Afghanistan, with a GDP per capita estimated at $448, fits into this same range, but with a figure from 2025: the IMF hasn’t published a 2026 estimate for it yet.

Country	Indicator	Value	Year
Yemen	GDP per capita (IMF)	$384	2026
Afghanistan	GDP per capita (IMF)	$448	2025
South Sudan	GDP per capita (IMF)	$488	2026
Burundi	GDP per capita (IMF)	$546	2026
Central African Republic	GDP per capita (IMF)	$613	2026
Mozambique	GDP per capita (IMF)	$632	2026
Madagascar	GDP per capita (IMF)	$656	2026
Somalia	GDP per capita (IMF)	$813	2026
Niger	GDP per capita (IMF)	$822	2026
South Sudan	HDI (UNDP)	0.388	2023
Somalia	HDI (UNDP)	0.404	2023
Central African Republic	HDI (UNDP)	0.414	2023

The HDI ranking tells much the same story, though not in the exact same order. According to the statistical annex of the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2025, covering 2023, South Sudan has the lowest HDI in the world, 0.388, last among 193 countries. Somalia follows (0.404), then Central African Republic (0.414), Chad (0.416), Mali and Niger tied (0.419), Burundi (0.439), Burkina Faso (0.459), Sierra Leone (0.467), Yemen (0.470), Madagascar (0.487) and Mozambique (0.493): all but Yemen are Sub-Saharan African countries, and all fall in the “low human development” band.

Why the Ranking Is Almost Entirely Sub-Saharan Africa

The concentration isn’t an isolated statistical detail. In 2024, 70% of people living in extreme poverty worldwide were concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank reports, and projections point to that share climbing to almost 80% by 2030.

Among the factors the World Bank links to this trajectory is state fragility — conflict and institutional instability. The World Bank’s projections estimate that by 2030, nearly 60% of the world’s extreme poor, around 436 million out of 757 million, will live in countries classified as fragile; fragile states in Sub-Saharan Africa alone would account for 367 million of them, nearly half the world total. It’s a correlation the World Bank documents with precise figures. It doesn’t explain every single country on the list, though: some of those at the bottom of the GDP or HDI rankings aren’t, as of 2026, in an active conflict. For a wider look at the economic context these countries sit in, and how global trade flows have touched them differently than richer economies, the Recap on globalization: definition, history, and how world trade works is a useful next read; for the opposite end of the scale, the economies with the highest GDP, there’s the ranking of the world’s biggest economies.

The European Exception: Moldova

Moldova is often called the poorest country in Europe. According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database, its nominal GDP per capita is estimated at $9,354 for 2026; at purchasing power parity, the estimate rises to $21,170, also according to the IMF.

Those numbers have little in common with the countries at the bottom of the world ranking. Its HDI, according to the UNDP, is 0.785, in the “high human development” band — more than double South Sudan’s 0.388. The World Bank, consistently, places it in the upper-middle-income band rather than the low-income one. “Poorest in Europe,” then, only holds within that one comparison. Set against the world ranking, Moldova’s income and HDI put it nowhere near the African countries at the bottom of it. For more on what separates poverty, inequality and underdevelopment — useful beyond this comparison too — there’s the Recap defining the three concepts; and the yardstick used here to measure income deserves its own closer look, in the Recap on GDP: what it is and how it’s calculated.