Gapminder

population for Taiwan updated

admin — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:55:14 +0000

We updated “population, total” & “total population with projections” for Taiwan 1950 and on.

dead and surviving kids per woman added

admin — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:26:27 +0000

We added two new indicators that show how many children each woman have on average that survive to their 35th birthday, or die before their 35th birthday. The two indicators sum up to the total fertility rate. Projections up to 2100 has been included. A graph with the indicators (with projections) can be seen here.

Population updated

admin — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:58:43 +0000

We have updated “population, total” and “population with projections”. “Population, total” covers the period 1700 up to today. “Population with projections” includes projections up to 2100, and we have also included data before 1700 for several countries.

We no longer attempts to do a quality grading of each observation. The data quality indicator is still available in Gapminder World, but it refers to version 1 of “total population”.

For more information please go to the documentation page.

co2 emissions updated

admin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 11:38:22 +0000

Both per capita and total CO2 emissions have been updated to 2008.

Life expectancy updated

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:30:57 +0000

“Life expectancy” and “Life expectancy with projections” has been updated. New data from World Population Prospect has been added. This also implies some backward revisions. See the documentation for more details: http://www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd004/

Children per woman updated

admin — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:53:21 +0000

We updated “Children per woman” with new data from World Population Prospects. Some backward revisions were also done. The indicator “Children per woman with projections” were also updated. See the documentation for more information: www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd008/

Tanzania: Fast drop in child mortality!

hans — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:55:46 +0000

UN just published estimates for child mortality in all countries in 2010! http://www.unicef.org/media/files/Child_Mortality_Report_2011_Final.pdf

It is a well documented compilation that brings much good news! Child mortality counted as deaths < 5 years per 1000 born has dropped in Tanzania that had:

1995: 155 deaths per 1000 born (Sweden had this rate 1896)

2010: 76 deaths per 1000 born (Sweden had this rate 1928)

This means that what Tanzania achieved in the last 15 years took Sweden 32 years to do! Tanzania improves with twice the speed of historical Sweden. They are catching-up. Tanzania´s average annual rate of reduction of child mortality over the last 15 years was 4.6 %. The Millennium Development Goal rate set by UN is an annual average rate of reduction of 4.3%! Tanzania is moving faster! But during the 5 years between 1990 and 1995 the child mortality in Tanzania was stagnant at about 155 per 1000 born. Some still measure MDG rate from 1990 and says Tanzania is not moving fast enough. But this is ridiculous (sorry for hard but true word). The MDG´s were set in 2000 and the use of a retrospective starting point makes no sense 10 years later. It is the speed of progress that matter, not the distance covered from a point back in history! Honor to Tanzania that is moving faster than MDG rate. Honor also to those that assisted in this magnificent achievement in reducing child mortality!

Hans Rosling

Datasets are not books

admin — Fri, 27 May 2011 09:59:35 +0000

Some international organisations keep selling public datasets as if they were books. This bad habit is a relic from the time when copying data was expensive. OECD still have a list of public datasets for sale. One item is especially absurd to keep selling. It’s the International Trade by Commodity Statistics Database, available at €530 for a subscription. This is the collection of all prices and quantities of international trade. The hard work of collecting this massive dataset is not payed for by OECD directly. 99.9% of the cost is covered by tax payers through public customs-registration in each country. The OECD price-tag is only to cover the final harmonization of data reported from various countries.

Why is the selling of this data especially absurd? Read about OECD: “The common thread of our work is a shared commitment to market economies…”. Not only is the selling of public data a misuse of a monopoly position, but the selling of price-data in particular goes against the core theory of Market Economy. A market is assumed to operate smoothly when participants have full and free access to information about prices. The OECD leadership need to remind themselves about what they believe in. They need to go home, pick up the their old textbook from school and read chapter one again. The World Bank did it. Eurostat is already providing monthly trade statistics for EU in huge free bulk files to be integrated in any tool or service.

The cost of providing important public data needs to be covered by the OECD core budget instead of trying to recover revenue by pretending datasets are books.

Ola Rosling

Selling sex without HIV in Pakistan

hans — Mon, 23 May 2011 17:42:26 +0000

People ask me: DO you believe UNAIDS data saying that less than 0.1 % of adults in Pakistan are HIV infected? YES I DO, the estimate is not based on reporting but on surveys. The uncertainty is wide, yet all surveys indicate that only a fraction of one percent of adults live with HIV in Pakistan. See Gapminder World www.bit.ly/mSuVw6

Next question is: SO because it is a Muslim country you don´t think there are sex workers in Pakistan ? Now I can answer because I read a new excellent thesis; “Poverty of Opportunity for Women Selling Sex in Lahore, Pakistan”, by Mohsin Saeed Khan. He concludes that a substantial number of women do sell sex in Pakistan. Through respectful interviews and yet with the highest scientific rigor Dr Khan reveals an emerging pattern with several different ways in which sex is sold. Ranging from brothels to selling in your own home. All for the same sad reasons as in other parts of the world. Khan surprisingly finds that most of the women selling sex in Lahore are married. He explains how (1) an increasing and by now relatively high condom use and (2) a relatively low number of returning clients have limited the spread of HIV. This thesis shows how HIV prevention and empowerment of poor women needs to be based on different types of local realities that can be studied and understood anywhere in the world. http://publications.ki.se/jspui/handle/10616/40537

Hans Rosling

Military expenditure data upgraded

admin — Mon, 23 May 2011 15:15:16 +0000

Thanks a lot to Elliot Rankin-Jones, who helped us identify an error in Gapminder World.

The data for “military expenditure (% opf GDP)” has been upgraded with the latest World Bank report.

Please try selecting one country at a time and zoom in (available from the lower left corner of the graph) to see its unique pattern, for example, the U.S.