Today
We are all surrounded by nickel. It’s one of the key ingredients in stainless steel, so most of us see it every day: from the pots we cook with, to the pipes in bathrooms, the batteries in mobile phones, and alloys in cars.
For nearly four decades, Indonesia — which has the world’s largest reserves — mined nickel but processed very little of it at home. This changed around a decade ago, when the government banned the export of raw nickel, forcing companies to process it domestically.
That’s the focus of the chart, which shows processed nickel production in tonnes among today’s largest producers.
Indonesia’s production increased more than 60-fold, going from around 22,000 tonnes in 2014 to over 1.4 million tonnes in 2023. The country went from producing 1% of the world’s total processed nickel to 41% in that period.
In 2021, Indonesia overtook China to become the world’s largest producer and is now far ahead. But much of that growth involved Chinese capital. The International Energy Agency reports that Chinese companies now own the vast majority of Indonesia’s nickel refining assets.
September 19
Over the last two decades, around 128 million hectares of forest have been cleared to make way for agriculture and forest plantations. That’s an area five times the size of the United Kingdom.
What has driven this deforestation?
A recent paper estimated the contribution of different agricultural products over the last few decades. In the chart, you can see the breakdown.
Beef production has been the largest driver by far, contributing over 40% of the total. This has mostly been the clearing of forest for grazing pasture, especially across Brazil and other countries in Latin America.
Oilseeds — mostly soy and oil palm — were the second-largest driver, again concentrated in Latin America for soy and in Indonesia and Malaysia for palm oil. While deforestation for palm oil was high in the early 2000s and 2010s, it has fallen a lot in recent years.
Forest plantations have been a large driver of deforestation in North America and East Asia. Deforestation for most other products — including cereals, roots and tubers, and cash crops like cocoa and coffee — has been concentrated in Africa, where yields have not grown quickly enough to offset rising demand.
September 17
Malaria was once endemic across much of the Caribbean. This map shows how much progress has been made: the islands in green are all malaria-free.
Some of these islands were certified by the WHO to have eliminated the disease decades ago. This requires, among other things, zero indigenous cases for three consecutive years. The list includes Grenada and Saint Lucia in 1962, Trinidad and Tobago in 1965, Dominica and Jamaica in 1966, and Cuba in 1973.
Others are on the WHO’s list of countries where malaria never existed, and those where it disappeared without a deliberate anti-malaria campaign.
At the center, you can see Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola. They are the Caribbean’s last island countries with endemic malaria.
The Dominican Republic is much closer to elimination — it reported around 1,200 locally acquired cases in 2024, compared with almost 38,600 in Haiti. But its success depends on Haiti’s too, because malaria doesn’t stop at the border. This is why malaria eradication needs coordinated efforts across countries.
September 15
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.
September 12
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.
September 10
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.
September 8
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.
