Cholesterol levels have declined among American adults in recent decades

Foreign aid has saved and improved millions of lives through health programs, food aid, and humanitarian assistance. Several countries — including the United States and the United Kingdom — have announced large cuts to their foreign aid budgets in the last few months. However, one country has been moving in the opposite direction in the last five years.

Since 2018, the amount Japan gives in foreign aid has more than doubled. You can see this in the chart.

In 2018, Japan gave $8.6 billion. By 2023, this had increased to $19.3 billion. This makes Japan’s aid budget equivalent to 0.44% of its gross national income. That was more than the United States, which gave 0.24%, but still less than many European countries, including the UK, France, Germany, and Norway, which topped the list at 1.1%.

Read my recent article on how small amounts of foreign aid can go a long way →

In the early 1980s, Nepal’s children suffered from some of the highest death rates from pneumonia in the world, with over 1,400 deaths for every 100,000 children under five. That meant around 39,000 children died from pneumonia each year, more than from any other cause.

Since then, Nepal has made huge progress. The death rate has fallen almost 20-fold. This improvement is due to various measures, including pneumococcal and Hib vaccines, better access to healthcare and antibiotics, and improved nutrition.

Despite this progress, pneumonia is still among the leading causes of death in children in Nepal. And we know that more progress can be made: high-income countries have achieved much lower rates, with fewer than 5 per 100,000.

Explore how deaths from pneumonia among children have changed in other countries →

When we think about money flowing from richer to poorer countries, foreign aid is one of the first things that comes to mind.

However, another major channel receives far less attention in mainstream conversations: the money international migrants send back to their families or bring home after working abroad. Unlike aid, which is publicly funded and often targeted at structural development, these private transfers typically aim at family support to cover critical needs such as food, healthcare, and education.

This chart shows how big that contribution is: in 2023, migrants sent or brought back $822 billion, almost three times the $288 billion provided through global foreign aid. Global foreign aid refers to net development assistance from national governments, with a very small portion coming from private donor philanthropy that meets the criteria for development assistance.

While this gives us a good sense of the size of these different flows, it’s important to note that the distribution of where each goes tends to differ. Most of the money sent home by migrants goes from high-income to middle-income countries, but low-income countries also rely on them relative to their GDP. When it comes to foreign aid, low-income countries receive almost as much money as middle-income countries.

Learn more about money sent or brought home by migrants →

Tracking the occurrence of natural disasters can save lives by helping countries prepare for future ones.

In our work on natural disasters, we visualize data from EM-DAT, the most comprehensive international disaster database. Make a chart of the number of recorded disaster events over time — like the one above — and it looks like the number of disasters rose alarmingly from the 1970s to the millennium. This has led to many media outlets and organizations claiming that the number of disasters has quadrupled over the last 50 years.

However, as EM-DAT itself makes clear, most of this is due to improvements in recording. The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, which builds this database, was not established until 1973, and didn’t start publishing EM-DAT until 1988.

The number of recorded disasters increased due to more focused efforts to obtain globally comprehensive data and improvements in communication technologies, which allowed more events to be included, even in the planet's most remote areas.

EM-DAT suggests that only data from 2000 onwards is relatively complete and comparable. The number of events before 2000 is likely to be underestimated. Note that this data does not tell us anything about the intensity of disasters.

Read my full article, with my colleague Pablo Rosado, on the limitations of disaster databases →

Global military spending reached its lowest point of $1.2 trillion in the late 1990s. Since then, military spending has more than doubled, reaching $2.7 trillion in 2024.

The chart shows a drop in military spending after the Cold War ended in 1989. This freed up resources for public expenditure in other domains, sometimes called the “peace dividend”.

But global military spending surged again in the 2000s, partially driven by US spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reaching $2 trillion by 2010. After stabilizing for a few years, it has risen sharply in recent years, fueled in part by the war in Ukraine.

Despite these increases, military spending as a share of GDP remains lower than in 1988 in most countries, as economies have grown substantially over this period.

We’ve recently updated our charts on military spending — browse them for different countries in our data catalog →

In 1796, Edward Jenner developed the world’s first vaccine against smallpox. As it was refined and widely adopted, many countries in Europe and North America, the Soviet Union, and island nations eliminated smallpox through national vaccination programs.

But in the mid-20th century, the disease remained widespread across Africa and Asia, infecting tens of millions every year.

Before the World Health Organization (WHO) committed to eradication in 1959, few believed it was possible, given the failures of other eradication efforts like malaria. But smallpox had no animal reservoir, clear symptoms, and there was an effective, low-cost vaccine.

By 1967, the WHO intensified the eradication campaign with more funding. The strategy focused on “ring vaccination” — containing outbreaks by vaccinating people around each case — and embedding the work within local health programs.

As the chart shows, this approach worked swiftly: within a decade, the number of endemic countries fell to zero. Smallpox was officially declared eradicated in 1980, two centuries after Jenner’s discovery. It’s a lasting triumph of science and cooperation.

Read more on our page on smallpox →

Thirty years ago, Portugal had some of the most fatal roads in Europe. It was second only to Latvia in terms of death rates from road injuries.

But since then, death rates have fallen by 84%.

The chart shows road deaths per 100,000 people compared to other European countries. This metric is age-standardized, so it keeps the population's age distribution constant over time.

Portugal still has slightly higher death rates than many of its neighbors in Western Europe, but the gap is much smaller than in the 1990s.

Portugal’s roads have become much safer for many reasons, including seatbelt laws, speed limits, stricter drink-driving enforcement, better road design and pedestrian zones, and improvements in the safety and resilience of cars themselves.

While it made dramatic improvements over the 1990s and early 2000s, this progress has slowed in the last five to ten years.

Explore road death rates across other countries →