April 17, 2024
Global economic inequality is very large. We see this in the differences between average incomes across countries. In this chart, average income is plotted along the horizontal axis and measured by GDP per capita. While the average income is $1,750 in Ethiopia, in Switzerland it’s around $69,000 — this is after adjusting for differences in cost of living.
Because standards of living are so different, richer countries set their own national poverty lines much higher, to measure poverty in a way that is informative and relevant to their citizens' incomes.
The scatter plot captures this insight. As we can see, richer countries (higher GDP per capita along the horizontal axis) tend to set much higher national poverty lines (higher position along the vertical axis).
In Switzerland, a person is considered in poverty if they live on less than the equivalent of roughly $36 per day; in Ethiopia, the national poverty line is around $2 per day.
→ Read more in our page on global poverty. If you are looking for more details on this Data Insight specifically, you can find it in the study on which it is based: Joliffe et al. (2022).
Yesterday
To tackle climate change, the world needs to rapidly reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. But before we reduce emissions, we need to stop them rising; the world needs to pass the peak.
Globally, total CO2 emissions are still slowly increasing. The Global Carbon Project just released its preliminary estimates for 2024, which suggest another 0.8% increase.
However, while total emissions have not yet peaked, emissions per person have. Globally, per capita CO2 emissions from fossil fuels peaked in 2012. When land use emissions — which are more uncertain and noisier — are included, they peaked in the 1970s and have fluctuated since then. You can see both trends in the chart.
This suggests that, globally, lifestyles are slowly decarbonizing. However, to come closer to our global climate targets, economies must decarbonize much faster to push total emissions into decline.
Explore the latest CO2 emissions data in our updated charts →
December 02
Measles vaccination has saved 94 million lives globally since 1974. Of those, 92 million were children.
The chart shows the number of lives saved by different childhood vaccines in the last 50 years. These estimates come from Andrew Shattock and colleagues and are based on global data on diseases, causes of death, vaccination rates, and vaccine efficacy.
Measles vaccines rank the highest in the total number of lives saved.
Measles is especially contagious and deadly. The virus depletes immune cells, making it harder to fight off measles and making other infections much more life-threatening. It can also erase immune memory to infections and vaccines that children have already encountered.
Before vaccines, almost all children caught measles, and it was a common cause of disability and death. With high measles vaccination rates, millions of lives are saved globally each year.
Read more in our article about the impact of global vaccination →
November 29
Today, Africa is home to 1.5 billion people. By 2070, the UN expects this number to more than double. Its estimates range from 2.7 billion to 3.7 billion, with the most likely scenario placing the African population around 3.2 billion.
This region is where most of the growth in the world population will occur in the next 50 years.
Europe’s population is already shrinking, with Asia and Latin America expected to follow from the 2050s onwards. The UN expects North America’s population to grow, although much slower than Africa's.
Read more about population growth →
November 28
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 Daily 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.
If you want to know more about the importance of growth and how it can be measured, you could read my article: What is economic growth? And why is it so important? →
November 27
The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, was established in 2003 to fight the global HIV epidemic.
Since its launch, PEPFAR has provided millions of people with antiretroviral therapy (ART) worldwide, especially in Africa.
The chart shows the number of people who received therapy through PEPFAR in a given year. In 2023, it was 20.5 million people.
ART is highly effective: it helps keep people with HIV healthy and reduces the risk of spreading the virus to others, saving more than one million lives each year.
But, after months of legislative delay, PEPFAR was recently renewed for only one year, raising concerns about the program's future after March 2025.
Explore data on other aid success stories →
November 26
In today’s Data Insight, we’re sharing a behind-the-scenes look at a part of our work we rarely talk about, but that is crucial in contributing to a more accurate understanding of the world.
We work with hundreds of datasets from many different sources. To check their quality, we’ve built in-house tools that flag unusual patterns, helping us spot when something seems off. Even in high-quality datasets, occasional errors can slip through.
The chart shows a recent example: after we updated a dataset, we noticed an unexpected spike in one of its time series. Investigating further, we traced the issue back to the data provider and let them know. They reviewed it, confirmed the problem, and corrected the error. Thanks to exchanges like this, several datasets have been improved this year.
Improving data quality is always a collaborative effort. We deeply appreciate the work of statisticians and data providers worldwide, who play a critical role in creating and maintaining these datasets. Our role is to help flag issues when we spot them and provide constructive feedback to make the data better for everyone.
November 25
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 →
