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.
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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.

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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.

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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.