November 25, 2024
For almost all of human history, food was scarce for nearly everyone. The reason for this perpetual scarcity was that whenever food production increased, it did not lead to more food per capita but to more people.
Food production did not increase per capita. Population pressure ensured that living standards remained only barely above the subsistence level. Economic historians refer to this mechanism as the Malthusian Trap, and if you’d like to know more, you could read my article about it.
This changed in the last decades. More and more societies around the world broke out of the Malthusian Trap. We see this in the data as increasing food production in per capita terms. The chart shows that farmers have grown many fruits, vegetables, and nuts faster than the world population has increased.
The increase in global agricultural output was crucial for the reduction of hunger and famines that the world achieved in this period. Whether or not we will be able to end hunger globally will depend on whether this increase in food production will continue.
Explore global and country-specific data on a wide range of foods in our Food Data Explorer →
May 9
In the late 20th century, a handful of countries — led by Brazil and the United States — turned to liquid biofuels to reduce their dependence on foreign oil markets, producing transport fuels from cheap crops instead.
In the early 2000s, interest in biofuels ramped up sharply, and not just in the Americas. They came to be seen as a leading method to decarbonize road transport. This was because today’s alternative to the combustion engine, the electric car, was still far too expensive.
Over the last two decades, global liquid biofuel production has grown sevenfold, as the chart shows.
Electric vehicles are now far cheaper and, in some places, cost-competitive with petrol cars, so biofuels are no longer seen as the central answer to low-carbon transport.
Yet, the world produces more of them than ever, and this is expected to grow over the coming decade, largely due to fuel standards and national policies that have promoted them.
May 7
Around 1.3 million people die from road injuries across the world every year. That includes the deaths of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians.
That’s around 2.4% of deaths from all causes.
As the chart shows, this death toll has been similar for decades, in the range of 1.25 to 1.35 million deaths each year.
However, with a larger global population and many more cars on the road, this means the death rate from road injuries — the number of deaths per 100,000 people — has fallen.
May 5
Solar and wind energy have grown quickly in recent years, but global electricity demand has grown faster. So while their share of electricity generation kept rising, it wasn't enough to push fossil fuels into absolute decline.
But in 2025, that changed. According to Ember's Global Electricity Review, low-carbon electricity sources grew faster than demand, pushing some fossil fuels out of the mix.
Global electricity generation increased by around 850 terawatt-hours (TWh) from 2024 to 2025. As you can see in the chart, solar and wind accounted for nearly all of this growth. While the world still burned slightly more gas, this was more than offset by a decline in coal and oil.
To reduce carbon emissions, fossil fuel use needs to keep falling in absolute terms — not just in the power sector but also in other energy and industrial sectors.
May 2
In 2018, my colleague Max Roser wrote an article titled “The Internet’s history has just begun”. His point was that while the Internet had already changed the world, large changes lay ahead because billions of people weren’t using it yet.
In this chart, I revisit that observation using more recent data from India, the world’s most populous country.
When Max wrote his article, roughly one in five people in India were online. The chart shows that since then, adoption has grown much faster than in the decades before. Today, more than 70% of India’s population is online — close to the global average.
When you look at related trends in the adoption of communication technologies, you see that much of the sudden acceleration in growth after 2018 was driven by mobile phones.
Mobile phone subscriptions in India took off in the early 2000s and had already reached 75 per 100 people by 2015. Internet access accelerated through its mobile networks, which were made affordable by new technologies and market competition — including a major market disruption, which started in 2016 when a new low-cost entrant drove down prices.
April 30
Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen across all regions in the last few decades.
The chart shows the number of live births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 since 2000, based on data compiled by the United Nations.
Globally, rates have fallen by over one-third. This decline has been even more dramatic in some regions. For example, rates have fallen by over three-quarters in Central and South Asia.
Birth rates have also fallen among adolescents aged 10 to 14 years old, where health concerns for pregnancy in such young girls are even greater.
April 28
One way to measure income inequality is to look at the share of all income that goes to the top income earners. The chart plots this for all seven South American countries with comparable 2022 pre-tax income estimates in the World Inequality Database.
The difference between the left and right bars is which earners they cover: the richest 10% on the left, the richest 0.1% on the right.
Looking at the left-hand bars, Colombia ranks top. It has the highest share going to the richest 10%, followed by Chile, Brazil, and Peru — in these four countries, the top 10% share earns more than half of all income. This is high relative to other countries around the world.
But looking at the dark blue bars on the right, the rankings change. Peru’s richest 0.1% receive about 22% of income, the highest in the region by far, and actually the highest in the world that year.
This chart shows just two metrics, but you would also get different pictures if you looked at Gini coefficients or the distribution of wealth instead.
So, what is the most unequal country in South America? It depends on what metric you look at. This is a region with high inequalities, but different indicators will tell you different stories depending on which part of the distribution you examine, and how incomes are measured.
April 25
Most people in the world would think very little before flicking on the lights, charging a mobile phone or turning on a laptop to read this.
But that’s a very different reality from the almost 700 million people in the world who have no access to electricity. While this number is large, it has halved this century, falling from 1.35 billion to 675 million. You can see this in the chart.
However, this progress has been far from even. The number has fallen across all regions except Sub-Saharan Africa, where it has increased.
That doesn’t mean no progress has been made: the share of people in Sub-Saharan Africa with electricity has doubled, rising from 26% to 53%. But population growth has outpaced this expansion, meaning the number of people without electricity has still risen.
