March 06, 2024
In 1981, 97% of people in the Chinese countryside lived in extreme poverty. Even in cities, it was more than 70%.
Since then, large economic growth has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people in China to leave extreme poverty behind, first in cities and then in the countryside.
By 2020, the share of people living in extreme poverty in both urban and rural areas was below 1%.
Today
In 1950, almost one in four children worldwide died before their fifth birthday. In Africa, one in three children died.
The chart shows the change since then. In every region, the mortality rate of children has declined.
In Africa and Oceania, the child mortality rate declined 5-fold, in Asia 10-fold, and in Europe about 27-fold.
Progress was not always steady. The sharp spike in Asia around 1960 was due to the “Great Leap Forward” famine in Mao’s China, the deadliest famine in recorded history.
And the progress is far from finished. The global average has declined to 3.5%, but this still means that about 4.7 million children younger than five years died in 2025 — 13,000 children every single day.
October 3
Globally, electricity generation per person has grown by more than 50% this century.
In the United Kingdom, things have moved in the opposite direction. Its generation per person peaked in 2003 and has fallen by more than a third since then.
You can see this in the chart, which shows generation per person since 1920. Today, levels are back to where they were in the late 1960s.
Some of that decline is a change in electricity imports, rather than demand: net imports have increased from 1% of electricity demand in 2010 to 9% in 2025. But it’s still true that the UK consumes much less electricity than it used to.
The most common explanation is deindustrialization: as the economy shifted from manufacturing to services, electricity demand fell. That’s part of the explanation, but far from all of it.
Sectoral data from the International Energy Agency confirms that electricity consumption in industry has fallen by one-quarter since 2005 (more if we calculate this per person). But residential and commercial electricity use has fallen by just as much.
Deindustrialization has reduced demand, but improvements in energy efficiency — such as the shift from incandescent to LED lightbulbs and the introduction of efficiency standards for appliances — have played an important role too.
October 1
The median age of a country or region is the age that divides its population into two equal parts: half of the people are older, and half are younger. As the population ages, the median age rises.
That’s what this chart tracks. It shows how the median age has changed across world regions from 2000 to 2023, the most recent year for which the UN publishes estimates.
The first thing that stands out is perhaps the least surprising: some regions have much older populations than others. Africa is very young: half of its population is younger than 19. Europe is much older: half of its population is over 42.
But there’s a second point that I think receives less attention in public discussions: how quickly this is changing. Of the six world regions, Latin America is where the median age has increased the most since 2000. It rose by a third, from 23 to 31 years, in a bit less than a generation.
Europe’s population is older, but the median age has been rising more quickly in Latin America this century. That’s largely due to fertility falling later and faster in the latter.
September 29
When people think about global oil, their minds often go toward countries in the Middle East.
But it’s the United States that is the world’s largest oil producer.
The chart shows oil production by country since 1990. As you can see, the US has been the largest producer for the last nine years, since it overtook Saudi Arabia.
Production in the US gradually declined during the 1990s and early 2000s, then increased sharply after 2010 and is now at an all-time high.
This data comes from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy.
September 26
In 2025, the amount of foreign aid given by the world’s richest countries fell by almost a quarter. That amounted to a reduction of roughly US$50 billion.
Aid cuts in the United States — and the shutdown of its agency for international development, USAID — got the most attention, and for good reason: the US is the world’s largest aid donor in dollar terms, so its contributions make a huge difference to the global total.
But many other countries cut their aid contributions, too. In the chart, you can see the change among the largest 10 donors (in dollar terms) from 2024 to 2025. This is given as a share of their gross national income.
Contributions fell in eight of the ten countries. Only Sweden and Italy increased their budgets.
The countries shown are the largest donors in dollar terms; some others not shown contribute far more in relative terms: Norway, for example, was the only country to give more than 1% of its national income to foreign aid.
September 24
If your job was to sell cars in Turkey in 2022, selling an electric one would be an unusual day at work. Just one new car out of every 100 sales was electric.
By 2025, this had become a fairly normal day. More than one in five new cars were electric — a more than 20-fold increase in just three years. You can see this rapid takeoff in the chart.
Why did electric models become so popular? In 2023, the government introduced tax relief for electric cars, cutting the registration tax compared to petrol and diesel cars. This was timed to coincide with the launch of Turkey’s first domestic electric car manufacturer, Togg, which has quickly become the market leader. Imports of cheaper electric car models, including from China, have also made these markets more diverse and cost-competitive.
This combination of factors has made electric cars far more affordable than they were just a few years ago.
September 22
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.
