it only means that really rich people are hiding their wealth and all the others are slightly less poor than they declare.

remember that GDP per capita is an average, meaning that a good amount of people in the country earn much less than that.

People in Salvador are actually quite poor, regardless of how much "informal" economy is going on in the country.

edit: I woould actually argue that an high volume of unofficial economy is a strong indicator that the country has a very weak economy in general. You can find the same conditions in all the poorer countries in the world, except maybe dictatorships such as North Korea ( we actually can't tell, because we don't have access to their economic indicators)

I don't think anyone argued there aren't poor people in El Salvador. I'm sure remittances and guest working out of country make up for some of the things not included in GDP, and average 'income' can definitely exceed average GDP if you add in remittances (for which El Salvador is known), but you're right that there are poor people in El Salvador. Has anyone ever disputed that?

Bringing up GDP as it pertains to the $30 wasn't even introduced by me, it was introduced by the person I responded to. I think you're replying to the wrong person if you have some issue with the GDP as it pertains to this topic. In fact I was on your side, explaining the issues with going off of the official GDP.

>Most of the economy is informal, it's estimated to exceed 60% of their economy.

Highly doubt it, would like to see a source for that.

Edit: Found it, 40% [1], I'm honestly surprised, that's waaaay higher than I thought it'd be.

1:https://www.worldeconomics.com/Informal-Economy/El%20Salvado...

Yes it exceeds 60% of the labor force [0] but you're right, it may not reach 60% of GDP. It can be difficult to measure informal economy.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1039952/informal-employm....