Gapminder uses cookies to improve its statistics and user experience. By continuing to use the site you agree to our cookie policy. X Close

High income – rare in tropical land-locked countries

The role of geography for the prospects of development has been hotly debated the last decade. Economists, like Jeffrey Sachs, have suggested that a country that are situated in the tropics or that are landlocked face a much larger challenge in development, for a number of reasons.
Continue reading “High income – rare in tropical land-locked countries”

New Google feature: “public data search”

Google has just launched a new search feature that makes it possible to search and compare public data in an interactive graph. In this first version, data for unemployment, for all US states and districts, are available and the results are very interesting:
Click this link to see and investigate US unemployment rate

Also read Google’s official announcement:
Google Blog: Adding search power to public data

Hans Rosling documentary on Swedish Television

“Roslings värld”, a new television documentary about Hans Rosling produced by the Swedish Television (SVT), will soon air in Sweden. In this portait by the Swedish journalist Pär Fjällström the viewers get to follow Hans Rosling during a few weeks in the end of 2008.

Continue reading “Hans Rosling documentary on Swedish Television”

Two new videos with Hans Rosling

200 years that changed the world

– 200 years of history in 4.5 minutes.

Viewer responses to the video:

“Thanks for posting another thoroughly thought provoking video.”
“This is brilliant, compelling and amazingly well visualized.”

Shanghai, New York, Mumbai

– Is Shanghai healthier than New York? And how do Washington D.C. and Mumbai rank?

Be the first to comment this video!

Learn to use Gapminder in the classroom (in Swedish)

Are you a teacher? Do you live in Sweden? We now offer a course on how to use Gapminder materials in the classroom. The course will be in Swedish, takes place in Stockholm on 15-16 of June and the prize is 2800 SEK + sales tax. If more than one teacher come from the same school, we give a 15% discount on the prize.

If you are a teacher who don’t speak Swedish, or for other reasons cannot participate, we are still interested to hear your suggestions for how we can improve the online resources for teachers on the website. You can contact Klara Johansson if you have some valuable suggestions.

Continue reading “Learn to use Gapminder in the classroom (in Swedish)”

Hans Rosling debunks myths in new lecture-series

<br />Can the population growth be stopped? Is Brazil, Egypt and Bangladesh now improving faster than Sweden ever did? And can everyone live on the same level as the rich countries?

In a new lecture series, filmed in a studio at the Swedish Television, Hans Rosling answer yes to all questions above.

The lecture has been divided into three videos that you can find in the video-section.

Part 1 – What stops population Growth?
Part 2 – Poor beat rich in MDG race
Part 3 – Yes they can!

Resources for teachers

We are planning to develop resources and manuals to make it easier for teachers to use gapminder in their teaching.

We already have found a couple of resources on the net (see links below).

We welcome any feedback, suggestions or comments from teachers who wants to use, or are already using, the resources of gapminder in their teaching. You can post a comment on this blog or send us an email.

Continue reading “Resources for teachers”

See new surprising trends in HIV

A new data set on the HIV epidemics in each country since 1979 is now available in Gapminder World. The dataset is an expansion of the excellent UNAIDS data, and illustrates several interesting points.

Here is a moving graph with the percent adults infected with HIV in each country plotted against the GDP per capita. The size of the bubbles shows the number of people infected with HIV in each country (not the total population, as is usual in the Gapminder graphs). Click Play to see the epidemic from 1979 to 2007, and to see new surprising trends.

Continue reading “See new surprising trends in HIV”

Democracy indicator added

We have now added an indicator of how countries are governed. This indicator puts countries on a spectrum from democracy to autocracy through expert scoring on a number of criteria. The range of the indicator is from 10 (fully instititutionalized democracy) to -10 (hereditary monarchy). See the example graph here (look at the colour of the bubbles for the democracy score). Data are available all the way from 1800 to 2007.
Continue reading “Democracy indicator added”

Life expectancy at birth updated and expanded

We have made an update of the indicator Life expectancy at birth.  To see this indicator together with Income per capita, follow this link.

The biggest change is that we now show this indicator for 155 countries back to 1800, although in most cases, the early estimates are based on a very rough model. This full dataset is not suitable for statistical analysis. Please consult the documentation for information about sources and data quality. A spreadsheet with detailed source information will be added later.

You can also see some tentative information about data quality in the graph, look for this under “For advanced users” -> “Data quality”, or use this link. Red is “very poor quality data” while blue is “very good quality data”. Read more about our data quality ranking in this previous blogpost.

Continue reading “Life expectancy at birth updated and expanded”

Income per person revised and expanded

We now have data for 219 countries and territories for 1800-2007, although the data for the 19th century are largely based on rough assumptions. For a couple of countries the revisions mean substantial changes. You can still find the old version of the indicator, under “For advanced users”. 

See the new indicator here. Note that the revisions also apply to all the “gaps within countries” graphs.

Continue reading “Income per person revised and expanded”

Asia best in math

A new international comparison in math achievement has just been released. Here we have plotted the average achievement for children in the 8th grade against Income per person in each country. Here we have the same graph but with the results for 4th graders. As can be seen, the top five achievers are all East Asian countries.

You find the indicators under the heading “Education” -> “Achievement”. A higher score means better achievements in the test. The data is based on an international math test for children in 4th and 8th grade, from the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).

Data on CO2 emissions updated

Gapminder World now incorporates the latest update on carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. This update adds more recent data and makes some corrections for earlier years. Data are now available from 1751-2005.

See this example graph which shows CO2 emissions per person against income per person, with the bubble size representing total CO2 emissions.

See "Gaps" within each country

After several months of testing, a new service of Gapminder is now available. 

During the process of development, different geographical regions within the same country could have very different speed of development, and this may cause significant internal gaps. By using statistics animation technology, these gaps could be visualized and the change over time could also be displayed. For example, you could compare the development of Utah from US and Shanghai from China during the last 3 decades: Utah vs Shanghai

We would strongly recommended that you read the “PDF tutorial” and the “Caveat” to the left of the graph first.

"Data quality" & documentation for Population added

At the new documentation page you will find the documentation for the indicators compiled by Gapminder, including population. There you can also download an Excel-file that includes not only all the data, but also information on sources and estimation methods for each observation.

To the extent possible we have also used this information to give each observation one of these “data quality ratings”:

  1. Very Poor data quality – the population figure is based on guesstimates or rough extrapolations
  2. Poor data quality
  3. Fair data quality
  4. Good data quality
  5. Very Good data quality – the population figure is based on a rigourous census or equivalent

Continue reading “"Data quality" & documentation for Population added”

"Population" is now complete for all countries 1800-2008

We have updated the indicator “population, total” so that it covers all countries and territories from 1800 to 2008. Population is by default used for the size of the bubbles in Gapminder World.

With “all countries and territories” we mean all the 192 UN-member plus 61 other entities (e.g. semi-autonomous territories, former countries and disputed territories). This gives a total of 253 countries and territories.

This work rests heavily on the work of Angus Maddison and is, to our knowledge, the most complete data set for population, containing over 20.000 observations. To the extent possible, we have also included meta-data for each observation with information on sources and estimation methods. Where possible, we have also included a quality rating of the observations, of which more of in the following blog-post.

Note: some of the observations, especially the earlier ones, are based on very rough estimates or extrapolations. Please check the data quality rating of the observations, described in the next blog-post.

Where do people eat most sugar and sweeteners?

At request we added a new indicator for consumption of sugar and sweeteners per day and person, i.e. it measures how many grams sugar and sweeteners does each person consume in one day.

In this graph we plotted sugar consumption against income per person.

It is of course tempting to plot this indicator against “bad teeth per child”.

In this graph we have done precisely that. However, the link between the two indicators seems to be relatively weak.

NOTE: the figures for 2004 is based on a very rough extrapolation (i.e. we use the data for 2003) and this was only done to allow a comparison with “bad teeth per child”.

Find all the countries of the world in the updated map

We have updated the map in gapminder world. We removed all “former countries” and “ad-hoc” areas, but included all small countries and territies. We included even the smallest countries and territories, such as Pitcairn (where the mutineers of bounty settled) and Canada’s somewhat less known neighbour St.Pierre-et-Miquelon.

You find the map under the tab “map” in Gapminder World. You can also follow this link which takes you directly there, although it should be noted that the direct link is slower than normal since additional map-related data has to be loaded.

New feature in Gapminder World

We have added a menu to the right of the Gapminder World to improve the usability. This new feature allows you to directly from the graph access information about the graph, find relevant links, watch tutorials, participate in discussions about the data, get tips on how to use the graph, and much more.

Go to the graph to see the new feature.

We have just started to experiment with this feature so for now we only have included a few points, but more will be added with time. Comments and suggestions are warmly welcome.

Which country has the best teeth in the world?

We have added a new indicator: “bad teeth per person” (you find it under “health” in the Gapminder World).

Here we have plotted “bad teeth per person” against “income per person”. Is dental problems worst in the richest or the poorest countries? There actually seem to be a tendency for the dental problems to be larger in the middle income countries, while the population in the richest and poorest countries have somewhat better teeth.

“Bad teeth per person” show how many decayed, missing or filled teeth an average 12 year old has in each country. The technical term of the indicator is DFMT for 12-years old and the data is taken from the WHO. We have unfortunatly only data for one year. Note that the data in many cases are actually based on estimates for earlier years.

There are some interesting discussions concerning this indicator over at Chris Blattman’s blog as well as at  the meaningfullness of little things.

Who has the oil, and who uses it?

We have added 24 new data series with data on consumption and production of oil, natural gas, coal and other energy sources.The source of these data is BP’s World Statistical Review 2008.

We think these are fascinating data: they show you who has the oil and who uses it, the remarkable close relationship between energy consumption and income, and many other interesting relationships.

Life expectancy expanded

We have used some additional sources to add more data to the indicator “Life expectancy at birth”. You can now follow several European countries from the 19th century and India, Sri Lanka and USA from the beginning of the 20th century. Data for Taiwan, which has previously been missing for this indicator, is now available from 1928. See Taiwan almost catch up with Australia, in both life expectancy and income. Or follow Sweden for 206 years of health history, with decreasing infant mortality and increasing life expectancy, as income also increases (income is seen as bubble color in this example).

Access to the data and information on sources can always be found (for all indicators) by clicking the symbols next to the indicator name on the axis.

Easier to download indicators

While it was always possible to download the data files underlying the graphs in Gapminder World, we have now made it a lot easier. Each data file now has download links which allow download to Excel (xls), Open Office (ods) or even PDF files.

To access this functionality, click on the grid symbol next to the data to view the data, then click the “Download” tab. Then click the link for the desired format.

We have also improved the information about many of the indicator, including better definitions and clearer titles.

CO2 historical data added and total emissions added

We have now added data on CO2 emissions per capita from fossil fuels going back to 1820 (or close to the start of the industrial use of fossil fuels). We have also added data on total emissions for the same country. A new example graph shows per capita CO2 emissions on the Y axis and total emissions as the size of each bubble. This graph is available here.

Press the “Play” button to see trends over the last 90 years. Among other things, it highlights that while China is close to passing the United States as the largest emitter of CO2, China’s per capita emissions are still much lower than those of the United States.

Large number of new indicators added

We have added over 100 new indicators, covering a wide variety of topics in health, economics, inequality, technology, geography and more.

Note: the indicator set is a “work in progress”, so expect indicators to be added and revised in the near future. Their names might also be revised and more detailed explanations will be added. Please also note that the coverage (in number of countries and time span) is generally smaller for these new indicators.

Data for "Income per person" now also for 2006

The indicator “Income per person (fixed PPP$)” has been updated with new data for the year 2006 for 173 countries and territories.

Here you can see the graph for 2006.

This data was based on the real growth rate, taken from World Development Indicators 2008, linked to the Income per person at 2003. At the same time the previous data for 2004-2006 was replaced with the new data for all these 173 countries and territories. This was also done for another seven countries, for which the new data only goes to 2005.

For most of these 180 countries or territories this has not caused any major changes in the data. The exceptions are Equatorial Guinea, Montenegro, Dominica and Serbia for which there seem to be discrepancies between the old and new data of up to 20%.

NOTE: “Life expectancy at birth” do also have data for 2006, but many of the other indicators still have no data for 2006.

NOTE: The documentation for “Income per person” has also been updated (it is now called “version 2”).

Minor bug corrected

We have corrected a minor bug related to the “link to this graph” function. Those who had selected specific countries to be displayed with trails might have found that other countries were selected instead.

However, the correct data was always displayed for each bubble.

New territory

The former state “United Korea” has been added as a possible territory in Gapminder World. So far the only indicator with any data for this territory is population.

Note for members in the Gapminder world community: the formal name-match name for this area is “Korea, United”, and the borders corresponds to North and South Korea.  

Download indicators to excel

It is now possible to download each of the indicators in gapminder world to excel.

Simply go to the list of current indicators in Gapminder World and click the link “download indicator to excel”, which you find in the sixth column.

Note that the row heights of the cells are not automatically adjusted in the downloaded files, so there might be texts in some cells that are not seen without going to the cell.

New “indicator” to display years by colors 1820-2010

A new indicator called “years 1820-2010″ has been added (you find it under “other”).

It is similar to the indicator “year 1950-“, i.e. it simply displays the year, with the only difference that this one covers a longer period. This is more suitable if you want to look at longer periods, e.g. air pollution and income. Use “year 1950-” when you want to look at a shorter time period.

By using this indicator for the color of the bubbles (which you do in the top right corner of the graph) and using “trails” for a selection of countries you can more easily compare the development over time of these countries.

Here you see an example of this (opens in a new window). In the graph you see a comparison of the development of both incomes and sulfur emissions of India, Malaysia and United Kingdom between 1860 and 2000.  The blue and green bubbles show the situation in the second half of the 19th century and the red bubbles show the situation in late 20th century.   

Here is a link to the spreadsheet of the indicator.

New "indicator" to make it possible to display years by colors

A new indicator called “year 1950-” has been added (you find it under “other”).

It simply shows the year, i.e. when we look at data for 1960 the indicator will be 1960 for all countries.

By using this indicator for the color of the bubbles (which you do in the top right corner of the graph) and using “trails” for a selection of countries you can more easily compare the development over time of these countries.

Here you see an example of this (opens in a new window). The development of China, USA, Botswana and South Africa between 1950 and 2005 is compared.  The blue bubbles show the situation in the 50’s, the green bubbles show the situation in the 70’s and so on.

Note: the indicator only starts at 1950 so obervations before 1950 will be without colors.

Here is a link to the spreadsheet of the indicator.

New Indicator: Public & private health expenditure (% of GDP)

On request we now add the new indicator “Public & private health expenditure (% of GDP)”.

It shows how big share of the average person’s income is being spent on health care, whether it is through the tax they pay, the health insurance they have or through out-of pocket expenses.

Here the indicator is compared with Infant Mortality in Gapminder World.

Here is a link to the spreadsheet of the indicator.

Unfortunatly the indicator only covers the years 2000-2004 (with three exceptions), so any tips on where we can find data covering more years are most welcomed.

New indicator: growth in income per person

On request we now add the new indicator “Growth in income per person (% per year)”, defined as the annual growth in Gross Domestic Product per person (percent increase from one year to next). It covers the period 1961-2005.

Note: this indicator is not necessary fully consistent with the “Income per person” indicator since different sources has been used.

Here “Growth in income per person” has been displayed against the level of “Income per person” in Gapminder World.

Here is a link to the spreadsheet of the indicator.

Population updated and expanded

The indicator population has been updated and expanded to cover more countries and territories and a longer time span. It now covers 251 countries and territories, including all of the 192 UN member states. 205 of them have data going back to at least 1820 (and 51 goes back as far as 1600).

Furthermore, the documentation has been more systematic (the full documentation will be available in a few weeks).

NOTE: the unit has been changed from “1000 persons” to “number of persons”.

NOTE 2: some of the observations (particulary the earlier ones) is based on very rough estimates. See the (coming) documentation for details.

New blog for Gapminder World

This is a new blog for Gapminder World, the site lets you explore a changing world from your own computer. Gapminder World is powered by Trendalyzer, a software produced by Gapminder (and aquired by Google in March 2007) that lets you look at a number of indicators of Human Development in a way that is easy to understand and follow.

In this blog we will keep you updated on when changes are made, when new indicators have been added as well as other news such as software development or development on data availability.

Turkey meets France

httpvh://youtube.com/watch?v=j4GztlkyedQ

About this Gapminder Video

There are many differences between Turkey and France. But are the differences increasing or decreasing? From a public health perspective, the answer is obvious, Turkey is catching up.

Even if the population growth is still faster in Turkey than in France, the number of children per women today is almost the same, which means that the polulation growth in Turkey will slow down.

Maternal mortality

httpvh://youtube.com/watch?v=LilKcFUhuNw

About this Gapminder Video

How many women die every year during pregnancy and childbirth? Do we even know?

The most qualified guess tells us that about 500 000 women die every year because of pregnancy. However, the numbers are so uncertain, that we can’t even tell if the situation improves from one year to another.

So, if the uncertainty about the maternal mortality is so high, is there any point of measuring maternal mortality at all? And how can we tell if things are improving?

The answers are: Yes it is. And there are better ways of monitoring progress for pregnant women in the world.

While maternal mortality cannot be used to measure progress year by year towards safe motherhood, at least not in low income countries, we need to know the magnitude of the problem. Therefore we need to know roughly how many women dies every year while giving birth.

But in order to solve the problem, and to see if we are improving from one year to another, we should look at other indicators such as how many births that are attended by skilled health staff.

Make sense of the world by having fun with statistics!

Gapminder and Google share an enthusiasm for technology that makes data easily accessible and understandable to the world. Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software unveils the beauty of statistics by converting boring numbers into enjoyable interactive animations. We believe that Google’s acquisition of Trendalyzer will speed up the achievement of this noble goal. Trendalyzer’s developers have left Gapminder to join Google in Mountain View, where Google intends to improve and scale up Trendalyzer, and make it freely available to those who seek access to statistics.

The Stockholm-based Gapminder Foundation will continue to spearhead the use of new technology for data animations. The goal is to promote a fact-based worldview by bringing statistical story-telling to new levels. In collaboration with producers of accurate statistics that are eager to give the public free access to databases, Gapminder hopes to recruit and inspire many users of public statistics.