Around one-fifth of adults in the world use tobacco. But large gaps often exist in smoking rates between genders.

Globally, around one-third of men use tobacco, while less than one in ten women do.

Men are more likely to use tobacco in almost every country in the world. You can see this on the chart, which plots the share of men (on the vertical axis) versus the share of women (on the horizontal axis). Nearly all countries lie above the diagonal line, which means more men do so.

This data is collated and published by the World Health Organization. It’s based on adults aged 15 years and older and includes all tobacco products. In most countries, smoking is the main form of tobacco use, but in some, smokeless or chewing tobacco is more common.

Around 1.5% of the world’s electricity was used for data centers in 2025. People are often surprised by how low this number is.

While data centers are a relatively small share of global electricity demand, this is not true everywhere. You can see the differences across several world regions in the chart.

The United States is home to the largest share of the world’s data centers. In 2025, they consumed around 5% of the country’s electricity.

But demand is even more localized than this. There are numerous states where data centers represent more than 10% of power demand. In Virginia, it’s over a quarter.

Even in Europe, this demand is very concentrated; beneath its 2% figure is Ireland, where data centers consume over 20% of electricity.

This local concentration of demand — combined with the speed at which AI is progressing — puts pressure on grids, even if electricity demand is not overwhelming at the global level.

In July every year, the World Bank sorts countries into income groups based on their per capita gross national income (GNI) in the previous year.

In this year’s update, China was very close to entering the high-income group: its GNI per person was $14,230; just short of the World Bank’s high-income threshold of $14,375.

The chart puts this in perspective. The bars show GNI per person for countries with at least 25 million people, ordered from poorest to richest.

Beyond income, China is already comparable to high-income countries in many dimensions. Its spending on research and development as a share of GDP, for example, is higher than in many European countries. It’s also a global leader in several technology fields, including clean energy and artificial intelligence.

But in other ways, China is closer to middle-income countries. Its productivity, measured by GDP per hour worked, for example, remains much lower than in high-income countries.

Economic growth is most important for the world's poorest people, and most of the world’s poorest live on the African continent. Are Africa’s economies growing?

The picture is mixed. In some countries, incomes have unfortunately declined in the last decades. This includes Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Burundi. I have written about this in my brief explainer on extreme poverty.

In today’s Data Insight, I want to focus on the other side: I want to highlight the African countries that are achieving economic growth. Nine of them are shown in the chart above.

In all nine countries, people’s average incomes have more than doubled since 1990.

This made substantial improvements in living standards possible: the share of people in extreme poverty and the rate of child mortality declined in all nine countries.

Women’s representation in national politics has increased dramatically in the last century.

But men still hold more parliamentary seats in almost every country. There are five exceptions: Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Rwanda.

You can see this on the map. Most countries are in brown, meaning they have a higher share of men; in many countries, they make up more than 75% of the seats (shown in darker brown).

Look closely enough, and you can see the five countries in green that have more women.

This data comes from V-Dem and is based on parliamentary seats in 2025. It’s worth noting that members of parliament have varying levels of influence and power across countries.

In 2024, around 18.5 million people born in India lived abroad. For the world’s most populous country, that’s not a lot: just over 1% of the population. This chart shows where they live, based on estimates from the UN, which compiles data from national censuses and population registers.

Nearly half of all Indians living abroad are in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries — that’s more than the US, UK, and Canada combined.

These figures are stocks, not flows: they record where people are from, not when they crossed a border. Pakistan is the clearest case: the two countries were one territory until 1947, and people kept moving across the new border for decades afterwards, so much of the 1.6 million there reflects migration that happened long ago.

The United States is home to thousands of data centers. They are part of the infrastructure that powers many digital services, including email, gaming, streaming, social media, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI).

As this chart shows, between 2018 and 2022, spending on building data centers in the US hovered between $500 million and $1 billion per month (when adjusted for inflation).

But since late 2022, large investments in AI have led to a rapid growth in data center construction — both by expanding existing facilities and building new, larger ones.

The latest figures released by the US Census Bureau estimate that $4.4 billion was spent in June 2026 alone — a 5-fold increase compared to November 2022, when ChatGPT was released by OpenAI.

These figures cover privately-funded construction and represent only the money spent on building the actual facilities, including materials and construction labor. They don’t include the cost of IT hardware like servers and storage, which can represent a very large share of total investment.

Malaria is an infectious disease that kills over 600,000 people a year. Most of them, children.

Its high death toll is at least partly explained by the fact that there are so many infections every year: an estimated 260 to 310 million.

I was curious to know how often people living in the worst-affected areas are infected with malaria. In the chart, you can see estimates of new cases per 100 people across high-burden countries. In recent decades, infection rates have declined but remain very high. There are around 30 new cases per 100 people each year.

It would be tempting to simplify this number and say that 30% of people living in Nigeria are infected each year. But that’s probably far from reality.

This is because the same people are often reinfected. When I looked at the scientific literature, I was surprised by how often. A study focused on children in Uganda found that those without preventative measures were infected around five times per year. Another found that in Burkina Faso, it was up to six times.

So, the reality behind the “30 cases per 100 people” average is probably very skewed. Many — particularly children who have not built up immunity — are infected multiple times per year, while most of the population is not infected at all.

More than 100,000 children under the age of 15 died from drowning in 2023. I found this statistic staggering when I first saw it. Drowning is one of the top causes of death among older children.

The World Health Organization explains that around 90% of all drowning deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. There, much of the risk comes from everyday exposure to water in ponds, rivers, and lakes used for bathing and washing clothes, or open wells used to collect water.

Deaths like these can be prevented, and they increasingly are. Drowning used to be far more common than it is today. That’s the focus of the chart.

In 1980, almost 30 children under five died from drowning for every 100,000 children in that age group. By 2023, this rate had fallen to 7.4. Death rates among older children also fell substantially.

Targeted measures can reduce drowning risks. These include covering wells, using doorway barriers or playpens to keep young children away from water, and water-safety training, among others.

Rising living standards matter as well, and much of the decline in the chart reflects this. As many countries have become richer, access to safe water has improved, so fewer families depend on ponds and open wells for everyday needs.

America’s most popular type of meat is chicken. In Argentina, it’s beef. And in Japan, it’s seafood.

There are large differences in the popularity of meat types across the world.

In the chart, you can see the share of supply that comes from different types of meat: poultry, beef, pork, sheep and goat, and fish and seafood. I’ve picked just a selection of countries that highlight some of the variation across the world.

Of course, countries also eat very different amounts of meat; this chart focuses on the relative quantities in national diets.

This data comes from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Many countries are in a fairly unique demographic position in history: their populations are shrinking not due to a temporary shock but to sustained structural decline.

If we look at the United Nations’ population estimates and medium projections, 66 countries and territories had already passed peak population this year. Almost all of them are in Europe and East Asia.

But there is one country in Southeast Asia in this position: Thailand. As you can see in the chart, the UN projects that its population will continue to fall throughout this century.

This is the result of a rapid drop in fertility rates. In 1970, women in Thailand had an average of 6 children; twenty years later, that had fallen to 2. This was as fast as China’s decline. Today, the rate is at most 1.2 children per woman, and some national statistics put it closer to 1.

What makes Thailand unusual is that this happened while it was still a relatively poor country. In 1970, it launched its National Family Planning Program. This was voluntary and non-coercive, but effectively increased contraceptive use, family planning access, and education levels for women.

In the 1970s, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution asking developed countries to contribute at least 0.7% of their national income to foreign aid. Most countries signed off on this goal, except for Switzerland and the United States.

But very few countries have met this target in the fifty years since then. Even today, only a handful of countries do.

In 2023, five countries met this target: Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark. Two years on, this has dropped to four, as Germany’s contribution shrank to 0.6%.

As you can see in the chart, other developed countries give less than 0.7% of their national income.

Guyana, a small country in South America, has seen the fastest growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world over the past decade.

This is illustrated in the chart, which shows GDP per capita for Guyana and several other countries, based on estimates from the World Bank.

The data is adjusted for inflation, so Guyana’s sharp growth is not due to price changes over time.

A large and sudden expansion in oil production has driven most of this growth. Between 2020 and 2025, the country’s oil production grew 860%, making it a key contributor to global crude oil supply growth.

Before oil extraction started, Guyana’s GDP per capita was well below the global average. It is now more than three times higher.

It’s too early to see the full effects of this, and hard to measure how far the oil boom has translated into better living standards in the country. Official poverty estimates, for example, have not been published since production began. But there is early evidence of the government channeling oil revenue toward citizens, for instance, through cash grants for every adult, free tuition at public universities, and increasing health spending.

Rich countries spend, on average, the equivalent of $7,300 per person on healthcare each year. This includes public and private expenditures.

In low-income countries, the equivalent is only around $125 per person.

This is based on spending data from the World Health Organization’s Global Health Observatory, which you can see in the chart across levels of income. The data is adjusted for differences in living costs between countries.

That means rich countries spend around 60 times as much per person on healthcare as the poorest countries.

This resource gap is one of the reasons for the stark differences in health outcomes. The average life expectancy is around 16 years lower in poorer countries, and other health measures, such as child mortality, maternal mortality, and disease burden, tend to be far worse.

Many countries have been facing intense heat this summer, and with predictions of a strong El Niño on the way, next summer could be even hotter. This has ignited debate on the need for cooling methods and technologies — most prominently, air conditioning (AC).

But how do rates of air conditioning usage vary across the world? Large international comparisons are hard to come by, but the International Energy Agency just published some new estimates for a select number of countries and regions.

The chart shows the estimated share of households with AC in 2025.

In Japan and the United States, AC adoption is almost universal; at least 90% of households have it. Most households in China also have AC; this share has increased rapidly over the past decade.

Adoption rates in Southeast Asia, Europe, and India are far lower, but for different reasons. In lower-middle-income countries like India, the reasons are often economic: AC would bring huge benefits, but many households cannot afford the upfront cost or the power to run it. Much of Southeast Asia faces a similar barrier.

In many European countries, it’s less of an economic barrier and more of a historical and cultural one. AC was not seen as a necessity because heatwave events were less frequent and intense than they are today. That is changing, and will continue to do so as the planet warms.

Most high-income countries have reduced road deaths substantially over the past decades. But the United States has made much less progress than other rich countries, and has even gone backward since the mid-2010s.

In this chart, I compare the trends for the US and a selection of other high-income countries to illustrate this point.

Consider Germany, which provides a useful comparison. In 1980, the US had about 25 road deaths per 100,000 people, and Germany had 22. But in the decades that followed, Germany’s rate fell steadily, while the US rate declined more slowly, and even rose again. In 2023, the last year in the data, the US rate was more than 4 times Germany’s.

In 2024, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the US published a report that traces the gap to a mix of road-safety measures that other rich countries use more widely, such as speed and red-light cameras or lower limits where people walk.

There’s also a connection with how much Americans use their cars. In the US, people drive much more. However, that doesn’t fully explain the gap — US roads are also significantly more dangerous than those in Germany per kilometer traveled.

What we pay for something in a shop often doesn’t reflect its true cost. Producing goods causes damage through carbon emissions that drive climate change, but the receipts for that damage rarely show up in the price. The costs are often hidden and diffuse, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

One way to make people pay the full cost is to introduce a carbon price. This can take the form of a carbon tax or a trading system, which caps emissions and lets companies buy and sell permits.

Many countries now do this. Around 30% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions have a carbon price. In the chart, you can see that this has doubled in the last decade. The biggest part of this rise came from China’s introduction of a trading system in its electricity sector.

While more and more of the world’s production has a carbon price, most prices are incredibly low. In a recent article, we showed that most priced emissions were valued at $10 or lower. That’s well below most estimates of the “social cost of carbon”, which tend to be greater than $100 per tonne.

Simply having a carbon price is not enough. It also needs to be high enough to change what people buy and make low-carbon alternatives worth investing in.

Renewables supplied around 6% of Morocco’s electricity in 2000; by 2025, that share was four times as high.

That’s what the chart shows: the growing share of electricity production that comes from renewables.

Morocco’s rise stands out in the region for how it got there – several other African countries with rising renewables shares, like Sudan, have relied primarily on hydropower. Morocco, by contrast, has achieved it with wind and solar production, as part of a targeted policy push.

This has made Morocco’s electricity mix cleaner: each unit of electricity now comes with a larger contribution from renewables. But total fossil-fuel generation has not fallen. New solar and wind production has gone toward meeting rising demand, rather than displacing coal.

Morocco still burns nearly three times as much coal for electricity as it did in 2000, although coal generation appears to have plateaued in recent years.

Improved crop yields have allowed the world to feed billions more people while sparing forests and other land from agriculture.

Global yields of cereal crops have tripled since 1961. As you can see in the chart, they have increased in all regions.

However, yields across most African countries have lagged behind. At 1.7 tonnes per hectare, they’re still less than half the global average of 4.2 tonnes.

This is bad for farmers: they get much smaller harvests and live on much lower incomes. It makes it harder for countries to feed their populations. And it’s a problem for biodiversity: lower yields mean that farmland has to expand into wild habitats.

Increasing agricultural productivity — particularly across Africa — is one of the biggest challenges of this century.

In recent decades, sub-Saharan Africa has been the world’s fastest-urbanizing region.

The region’s most populous country, Nigeria, shows the scale of that change. In 1950, only around 1 in 10 Nigerians lived in a city. Today, it is nearly 1 in 2.

As you can see in the chart, over the same period, the share living in rural areas fell, but so did the share living in towns and suburbs, which had been the largest group in 1950 by a substantial margin.

Nigeria’s population became much more concentrated in cities — both because people migrated into established cities, and because new ones emerged as towns and suburbs grew dense and large enough to be classified as cities.

In early-industrializing countries, rapid urbanization was often closely tied to industrialization. Today, in many lower-income countries, including across much of sub-Saharan Africa, it is happening under different conditions.