Congo's income adjusted upwards in Gapminder World

Income per person for Democratic Republic of Congo has been revised. We have made an upward adjustment of the income for 2005 with 25%. We have also adjusted the growth rate from 1991 and on. Congo is still the poorest country in the world. The background and details of this adjustment  are documented in our documentation, (p. 23-25).

Children per women since 1800 in Gapminder World

The data for “Children per woman (total fertility)” has been updated to cover 195 countries from 1800-2008. It is now possible to see the entire “demographic transition” that most countries have followed: going from many children and short lives, too few children and long lives.

» Click here to see children per woman vs life expectancy in Gapminder World

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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.

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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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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.

"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.

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.

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.

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”).

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.