By Peter OBIORA InvestAdvocate

Lagos (INVESTADVOCATE)-The World Bank late Thursday reported that low and middle income countries produced goods and services almost half of the world’s total output and worth about $45 trillion out of the over $90 trillion reported in 2011.

This is contained a summary of results and findings of the 2011 International Comparison Program (ICP) released by the World Bank and made available to InvestAdvocate.

The Global Bank said under the authority of the United Nations Statistical Commission, the 2011 round of ICP covered 199 economies – the most extensive effort to measure Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) across countries ever. ‘’ICP 2011 estimates benefited from a number of methodological improvements over past efforts to calculate PPPs,’’ the World Bank reported.

‘’The ICP’s principal outputs are PPPs for 2011 and estimates of PPP-based gross domestic product (GDP) and its major components in aggregate and per capita terms. When converting national economic measures (e.g. GDP), into a common currency, PPPs are a more direct measure of what money can buy than exchange rates,’’ the World Bank said.

According to the report, the ICP implementation was led and coordinated by the ICP’s Global Office, hosted by the World Bank, in partnership with regional agencies overseeing activities in eight (8) geographic regions: Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Latin America, the Caribbean, Western Asia, Pacific Islands, and the countries of the regular PPP program managed by the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The World Bank said in addition to the eight (8) geographical regions, two (2) “singleton” economies, Georgia and Iran, participated in bilateral exercises with partner economies, without being part of any regional comparisons.