What country is really the best for the individual?

[Jonathan]

Sorry to get off topic again, but I have to defend myself. You guys wholly misconstrued what I said. I said:

...if you charge a reasonable amount for a product but pay the workers little or nothing, of course the GDP is going to be big.

(I just added the italics.)
The italicized part is important. What I mean is that you sell a product for about the average amount. Your material costs will be the same no matter what we'll assume. But you pay the workers very little. (Oh, and by 'you' I mean the collective business owners of a country.) From this we can get a vague inequality:
[I-(M+w)]>[I-(M+W)]
where I is the income from your product, M is the cost of materials, the parts inside the brackets on each side is your profit, w is the very little you pay the workers, and W is the minimum wage you should feel is ethical to pay your workers (but obviously don't).
What this shows is that you, the collective business owners of some country, will benefit by paying your workers very little and pocketing the cash you saved by doing so.
This I feel is self evident, one really needn't take a class to get it.

 

[Njorl]

You don't know how to calculate GDP. It is the sum total of all goods and services. The value of the goods is considered to be the sale price minus production cost. The production costs also contribute to GDP. If costs are low, the good value is high. Whether you pay your workers a little or a lot, the effect on GDP is determined by the final price charged for the goods.

Njorl

 

[Nereid]

Shanghai! Hong Kong and Guangzhou

Back to the original question ("what country is really the best for the individual?")

Take a young, entrepreneurial person looking for a place to make a small fortune through her business smarts, and wanting a place with material comforts, a night-life, a buzz.

Despite the fact that Shanghai and Guangzhou are in the People's Republic of China, where the Chinese Communist Party is in charge (an avowedly socialist group), they should both be high on our individual's list.

In fact, they may be better places than Hong Kong; the mood in HK is nowhere near as upbeat as in the other two cities,