GDP per capita and Software Piracy, part II: How much is that software in the window? · 284 words posted 01/12/2004 01:14 PM
As Rishab Ghosh and others have pointed out, the cost of licensing software is often several times the per capita GDP in many developing countries; for example, the typical worker in Sierra Leone would have to work for 4 years to pay for Microsoft Windows and Office. I thought it would be interesting to plot the cost of a popular piece of web design software compared to the per capita GDP in 10 countries: the five countries with the worst rates of software piracy (China, Indonesia, Russia, Ukraine, and Vietnam) and the best (Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, UK, and the United States).
To compare the GDP per capita to the cost of Macromedia Studio MX 2004, select a country from the dropdown list in the Flash chart below. The blue circle represents the size of the GDP per capita in US dollars, and the yellow circle represents the cost of the software suite in US dollars. In other words, the larger the blue circle, the easier it is to afford the software.
View the graph (link opens in new window)
As you can see, the differences are striking: the Macromedia software suite costs slightly less than 3% of GDP per capita in the United States; in Vietnam, on the other hand, the cost of the software is double that of per capita GDP.
The cost of the software was obtained from the Macromedia Worldwide Store. The GDP and piracy information came from the Economist and the BSA (see my previous post for citations). All figures were converted into US dollars in mid-December when I collected the data. Finally, I don’t intend to pick on Macromedia; I selected their software suite because it’s the industry leader in its category.
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