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Polish IQ ahead of France, USA, Canada, Israel, Ireland... [47]
For 104 of the 185 nations, no studies were available. In those cases, the authors have used an estimated value by taking averages of the IQs of neighboring or comparable nations. For example, the authors arrived at a figure of 84 for El Salvador by averaging their calculations of 79 for Guatemala and 88 for Colombia. Including those estimated IQs, the correlation of IQ and GDP is 0.62.
To obtain a figure for South Africa, the authors averaged IQ studies done on different ethnic groups, resulting in a figure of 72. The figures for Colombia, Peru, and Singapore were arrived at in a similar manner. For People's Republic of China, the authors used a figure of 109.4 for Shanghai and adjusted it down by an arbitrary 6 points because they believed the average across China's rural areas was probably less than that in Shanghai. Another figure from a study done in Beijing was not adjusted downwards. Those two studies formed the resultant score for China (PRC). For the figure of Macau, the average IQ is 104 which is obtained from the score of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and in such a way transformed into an IQ score.[6]
In some cases, the IQ of a country is estimated by averaging the IQs of countries that are not actually neighbors of the country in question. For example, Kyrgyzstan's IQ is estimated by averaging the IQs of Iran and Turkey, neither of which is close to Kyrgyzstan—China, which is a geographic neighbor, is not counted as such by Lynn and Vanhanen. This is presumably because the ethnic groups of the area speak Iranian and Turkic languages, but do not include Chinese.
To account for the Flynn effect (an increase in IQ scores over time), the authors adjusted the results of older studies upward by a number of points.
