Data Insights
Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, published every few days.
May 6, 2024
The age structure of populations varies widely across countries
There are many ways to examine a country's age structure. One interesting approach is to look at the age group with the largest population, as shown in the world map.
Across most African countries, the largest demographic is children younger than 10.
This contrasts sharply with Europe, where the largest age groups tend to be much older. Many European countries are most heavily populated by those in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. For example, the fifties are the largest age group in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. In Monaco and Croatia, the most populous are those in their sixties.
If we look back to 1950, the map looks very different. Small children and teenagers were the most populous age groups in almost all countries.
Over the last 70 years, birth rates have declined in most countries, and life expectancy has increased, leading to aging populations worldwide.
May 2, 2024
Data on suicides is lacking, especially from poorer countries
Many countries do not collect or publish national data on suicides, especially poorer countries.
Around 60% of high-income countries have shared data on annual suicide rates in a given year with the World Health Organization, but less than 20% of lower-middle-income countries do, and no low-income countries have done so since 2011.
This lack of data is partly due to an absence of vital registries — where death certificates are collected — and coroners, doctors, and legal systems to determine and record causes of death across the population.
Without this data, statistical organizations estimate suicide rates based on other data, such as surveys and data from similar countries. This is challenging because suicide is highly stigmatized in many countries and sometimes even criminalized.
The chart also shows that more countries have improved their data collection and reporting systems. With more effort to improve vital registries, we will gain a greater understanding of where and why suicides occur, who is at risk, and how to prevent this tragic cause of death.
May 1, 2024
The global eradication of polio is within reach
Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that largely affects children, causing paralysis and permanent disability; it can also lead to death.
In the early 1980s, over 50,000 cases were reported annually. This only includes cases that have been diagnosed and reported to health authorities. The true number of total cases was likely higher than 300,000 in the worst years.
The number of reported cases has been dramatically reduced in recent years. We have just updated the data shown in the chart. Last year, there were 536 paralytic polio cases worldwide.
Much of this reduction has come from global efforts toward better vaccination and improved screening and testing, primarily coordinated by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), founded in 1988.
Global polio eradication is possible through high vaccination rates, thorough screening and testing to detect cases, and rapid, high-quality immunization campaigns to limit outbreaks.
Read more on how our generation can eradicate polio globally →
April 29, 2024
Emissions of substances that deplete the ozone layer have fallen by more than 99% since 1989
In 1987, countries around the world signed the Montreal Protocol to reduce emissions of ozone-depleting substances — such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), and halon gases used in refrigerators, deodorants, and other industrial processes.
This chart shows that since the Montreal agreement entered into force in 1989, global emissions of ozone-depleting substances have fallen by more than 99% as manufacturers have substituted them for less harmful alternatives.
The Montreal Protocol is one of the most successful international agreements to date.
April 26, 2024
Primary education in Morocco: from less than half to nearly universal attendance
In the 1970s, less than half of Morocco's primary-age children attended school. Today, nearly every child is in school, with enrolment rates having soared to over 99%, according to data published by UNESCO.
Though this is a remarkable achievement, there's still room for improvement in education quality. Only about a third of these students achieve basic reading comprehension by the end of primary school.
Focusing on getting children into school has been crucial. The next step is to enhance the quality of education to ensure they not only attend but also learn and thrive.
Explore the data →
April 25, 2024
Colombia’s homicide rate has more than halved since the 1990s
Half as many people died from homicides in Colombia in recent years than only a few decades ago.
In the 1990s, more than 60 people per 100,000 were killed in homicides each year, according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Homicide was the cause of 15% of all deaths at the time.
The homicide rate has fallen significantly since then, as the chart shows. In 2021, it was around 27 homicides per 100,000 people.
The country’s rate is now much closer to the regional rate of the Americas, at 15 homicides per 100,000 people.
Still, this means that homicides are almost twice as common in Colombia than in its world region, and more than 13 times as common than in Europe — the safest world region — with only 2 homicides per 100,000 people.
April 24, 2024
Nearly one in five cars sold in 2023 was electric
The International Energy Agency (IEA) just published its latest annual Global EV Outlook. It provides its final estimates for sales of electric vehicles worldwide in 2023.
The IEA estimates that almost one in five (18%) cars sold in 2023 were electric — double the share from just two years earlier.
There are significant differences in adoption worldwide. This chart shows new sales shares by country. In Norway, more than 90% of new cars were electric. In China, it was almost 40%; in the European Union, 22%; and in the United States, just 10%.
These figures include fully electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. You can find this data broken down by vehicle type in this chart.
April 23, 2024
2023 was a population crossroad
China is no longer the most populated country in the world. According to estimates by the UN World Population Prospects, India took over in 2023. That year, both countries had around 1.4 billion inhabitants — as many as the entire African continent.
However, as we can see in the chart, China’s population is expected to decline, and India’s growth is expected to slow down. Meanwhile, Africa’s population is expected to keep growing; the UN estimates it could reach close to 4 billion people by the end of the century.
April 22, 2024
Investments in waste management are key to ending plastic pollution
Today, April 22, is Earth Day. This year’s theme is ending plastic pollution.
The world produces vast amounts of plastic: more than 450 million tonnes yearly. But when it comes to plastics leaking into our rivers and oceans, it’s the management of plastics — not their production or use — that matters most.
When plastic is not correctly recycled, incinerated, or stored in sealed landfills, it can pollute the environment. According to the OECD Global Plastics Outlook, around one-fifth of the world’s plastic waste is mismanaged in this way.
As this map shows, mismanaged plastic waste per person tends to be higher in low-to-middle-income countries. This is because their plastic use has increased much faster than their investments in waste management infrastructure. (These estimates come from research by Lourens Meijer and colleagues.)
To end plastic pollution, improvements in waste management — alongside more responsible use of plastics — will be critical. Domestic policies will be crucial, but richer countries can also contribute through foreign investments in waste management infrastructure.
April 18, 2024
China has been expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal
China has significantly increased its number of nuclear warheads in the last 20 years.
In 2003, the country had 235 warheads. A steady increase brought this number to 280 in 2018, and a more recent acceleration to 410 as of 2023.
China now has a larger nuclear arsenal than France and the United Kingdom, as the chart shows.
It is not the only country expanding its arsenal: India and Pakistan have also increased the number of their warheads; and the global distribution of warheads remains dominated by Russia and the United States, which each have several thousand warheads.
But China has been the country most rapidly expanding its number of nuclear weapons in recent years.
This increases the risk of accidents and the threat nuclear weapons pose to humanity.
April 17, 2024
National poverty lines differ widely between countries
Global economic inequality is very large. We see this in the differences between average incomes across countries. In this chart, average income is plotted along the horizontal axis and measured by GDP per capita. While the average income is $1,750 in Ethiopia, in Switzerland it’s around $69,000 — this is after adjusting for differences in cost of living.
Because standards of living are so different, richer countries set their own national poverty lines much higher, to measure poverty in a way that is informative and relevant to their citizens' incomes.
The scatter plot captures this insight. As we can see, richer countries (higher GDP per capita along the horizontal axis) tend to set much higher national poverty lines (higher position along the vertical axis).
In Switzerland, a person is considered in poverty if they live on less than the equivalent of roughly $36 per day; in Ethiopia, the national poverty line is around $2 per day.
→ Read more in our page on global poverty. If you are looking for more details on this Data Insight specifically, you can find it in the study on which it is based: Joliffe et al. (2022).
April 16, 2024
Data on many mental illnesses is only available for a small number of countries
Not all countries have data on how common mental illnesses are in the population. In fact, for many mental illnesses, only very few countries have this data.
This means global estimates of mental illnesses have wide uncertainties, and many people don’t get the help they need.
This chart shows, for each mental illness, the number of countries that had data in any year since 1980 on the prevalence of that mental illness in the general population.
This is from the IHME’s Global Burden of Disease study, a large global dataset presenting global estimates for various health conditions.
As you can see, data on conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, cannabis use disorder, and major depressive disorder come from a significant number of countries.
But data on others — such as bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorders, and anorexia nervosa — came from far fewer countries.
With this large knowledge gap, the world is limited in making progress against many mental illnesses.
April 15, 2024
Moore’s law has accurately predicted the progress in transistor counts over the last 50 years
Moore's law was first described in 1965 by Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel. He observed that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubled every two years.
This trend has continued over the last half century, and Moore’s predictions have remained surprisingly close to reality.
The chart shows data collected by computational scientist Karl Rupp on the number of transistors per microprocessor over the last 50 years. The data is plotted on a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis. The line follows a straight path, indicating stable exponential growth.
The average transistor count per microprocessor in 1971 was 2,308. In 2021, it was 58.2 billion. That's an average doubling time of 2.03 years — extremely close to Moore’s law.
April 12, 2024
Language-based AI systems have grown rapidly in recent years
In recent years, there has been a notable shift towards artificial intelligence (AI) systems focused on language. They have outpaced advancements in other sectors like image recognition, gaming, and biology.
This is shown in the chart, which shows the number of AI systems considered notable by Epoch AI researchers.
The shift is primarily due to technical advancements in AI algorithms, particularly the introduction of “transformers” around 2017. As shown in the chart, the rapid development of language-based AI systems began around this time.
Transformers have radically changed natural language processing by evaluating chunks of text — “tokens” — instead of focusing on one word at a time. For example, by considering the whole sentence "The bank can ensure your money is safe", transformers can quickly discern that "bank" refers to a financial institution, not the side of a river.
This capability has significantly enhanced AI's ability in complex language tasks, improving machine translation and text generation, and making interactions more intuitive and effective.
April 9, 2024
What’s the leading cause of death in each country?
What's the leading cause of death in each country?
In most countries, it's cardiovascular disease or cancer, as shown on the map.
However, in Africa, infectious diseases are much more common. In several West African countries, the leading cause of death is diarrheal disease, malaria, or neonatal causes. In southern Africa, it's HIV/AIDS.
What’s tragic is how many still die from these causes despite being preventable with public health efforts and treatment. With greater access to clean water and sanitation, malaria bed nets, vaccines, neonatal healthcare, and antiretroviral therapy, many of these deaths could be prevented.
April 8, 2024
Japan has the highest ratio of elderly people relative to working-age people globally
Demographers define the “old-age dependency ratio” as the number of people older than 64, relative to the number of working-age people.
It’s in Japan that this ratio is the highest in the world. As the chart shows, it surpassed 50% in 2021. This means there are only two working-age people for every elderly person in Japan.
Italy and Finland come next, with 37% — closer to three working-age people for every elderly person. The global figure is 15% — a ratio of 1 to 6.
The world is aging overall, and some countries are aging much more rapidly than others.
April 5, 2024
The plurality of people in the world now live in cities
One of the big demographic trends in recent decades has been the shift from rural places to cities.
Until 2020, most people in the world lived in smaller urban settings like towns and suburbs, with populations between 5,000 and 50,000. Since then, cities with more than 50,000 people have become the most popular living areas worldwide, as shown in the chart.
April 4, 2024
France’s nuclear fleet gives it one of the world’s lowest-carbon electricity grids
France generates two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power. As the chart shows, that’s far more than the global average, just under 10%. Even though its share in France has declined slightly in recent years, it’s still its dominant power source.
Nuclear power is a low-carbon electricity source, allowing France to have a very clean electricity mix for decades.
Per unit of electricity, France emits far less carbon dioxide (CO2) than its neighbors and has some of the lowest-carbon power in the world. The global average is 438 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. In France, this figure is 85 grams.
April 2, 2024
Cancer mortality has declined in many countries
The chart shows age-standardized death rates from cancer in different countries since 1950.
Age-standardized rates tell us about the impact of cancer among people of the same age. This allows for a fair comparison across time and between countries — for example, to see how rates for fifty-year-olds today compare to fifty-year-olds in the 1950s.
In the United States, for example, the age-standardized death rate from cancer has declined by around a third since its peak in 1990.
A significant driver has been the large decline in smoking, which causes a wide range of cancers. But we’ve also achieved many more advances in cancer medicine and public health, such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, surgery, vaccination against HPV and hepatitis, treatment for H. pylori, and advances in screening, diagnosis, and monitoring.
March 29, 2024
The service sector now represents about half of employment across the world
As this data from the International Labour Organization shows, the share of service jobs in all global employment has increased in the last 3 decades, from 34% in 1991 to 51% in 2019.
In this slow but steady change in the world's economy, the share of employment in agriculture has seen an equivalent decrease, from 44% to 27%.
The share of employment in the industry sector has remained stable throughout this period, at 22%.