Today
Several data sources show that theft in England and Wales has declined in recent decades.
One of those is police records — but they only capture reported crimes, and many people don’t report thefts. So it’s also important to draw on a second data source. The data we show here comes from reports based on face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of the population. In these interviews, the public is asked about their personal experiences of crimes in the previous 12 months.
On this chart, we’ve broken down the numbers by four different types of theft.
You can see a dramatic drop in vehicle-related thefts. These peaked in 1995, with an estimated 4.3 million incidents in England and Wales. While some of these incidents involved the actual stealing of a vehicle, many were either attempted break-ins or the theft of specific components, such as radios.
Burglaries — which involve someone breaking into a building to steal — also peaked in the mid-1990s.
Both types of incidents have decreased by more than 80% since then.
Pickpocketing or “snatching” has been more persistent. These crimes have decreased slightly from the 1990s and early 2000s, but have also experienced an increase in recent years.
January 27
In 2000, less than 10% of the population in Indonesia had access to clean cooking fuels. This is now over 90%, as the chart shows.
Clean cooking fuels are those that, when burned, emit less than the World Health Organization's recommended amounts of air pollutants. They reduce the burden of air pollution — and its health impacts — for the households that use them.
In 2007, the Indonesian government launched a national program to move from kerosene cooking fuels to liquefied petroleum gas.
This shift has greatly reduced particulate pollution and improved health outcomes. Death rates from indoor air pollution have fallen steeply.
January 24
Back in 1980, stomach cancer was the type of cancer that someone in Japan was most likely to die from. Its death rate — the number of deaths per 100,000 people — was over twice as high as the next largest killer, lung cancer.
But this is no longer the case. Since then, death rates from stomach cancer have dropped by more than 70%. You can see this change, compared to other cancers, in the chart.
While death rates of some other cancers have also fallen, these declines have been much smaller. Some types even saw an increase in death rates over these four decades.
Improvements in prevention, detection, and treatment have all contributed to this huge decrease in stomach cancer death rates. Stomach cancer is often caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori; better hygiene and food safety have reduced its spread. Early screening for the infection has also made a big difference to survival rates.
This progress is not unique to Japan. Many countries, and the world as a whole, have seen a huge reduction in stomach cancer mortality.
Note that these death rates are age-standardized, which means they hold the age structure of the population constant. This allows us to understand how the risks of someone of a given age have changed over time.
January 22
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the social and economic disruption that it left behind, suicide rates in Lithuania increased rapidly. They climbed in the early 1990s and reached a peak in 1995. At 45 suicide deaths per 100,000 people, the country had one of the highest rates in the world.
But in the last few decades, rates have more than halved. You can see this in the chart.
Several factors likely contributed to the decline. Economic conditions improved, with average incomes more than doubling over just a decade from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and continuing to rise thereafter. In 2007, the country launched its first National Mental Health Strategy. A decade ago, it also developed a Suicide Prevention Bureau and a Suicide Prevention Action Plan.
This progress has saved many lives. Yet today it still has some of the highest rates in the world. That’s because suicide rates have not only fallen strongly in Lithuania, but in many countries — estimates for the global suicide rate suggest a 40% decline since 1995.
January 20
Since the late 20th century, astronomers and space agencies have taken steps to monitor the threat of large asteroids passing near Earth. They set up international efforts to find these objects early, track their paths, and learn more about what they’re made of, so we’d have the best chance of spotting a real collision risk in time.
As the chart shows, more than 40,000 near-Earth asteroids have been discovered and tracked since 1990. NASA estimates that we’ve already found over 90% of near-Earth objects larger than 1 kilometer. These are the most dangerous ones, because an impact at that size could cause global-scale damage.
Explore more interactive charts on space exploration and satellites →
January 17
If we look at income levels across countries in South and Southeast Asia, Malaysia is far richer than many of its neighbors. Its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has almost doubled since 2000. It is now more than three times higher than that of Cambodia, Laos, and Bangladesh, and more than double that of Indonesia and Vietnam.
But if we look at measures of childhood nutrition, Malaysia is not doing better. You can see this in the chart. While its neighbors have made progress on childhood stunting — the share of children under 5 who are too short for their age — Malaysia has regressed. In 2000, 20% of children were “stunted”, and this has increased to 24%.
Malaysia also stands out at a global level. When we plot the share of children who are stunted against GDP per capita, the country is a clear outlier for its level of income. Most other countries at this level of economic development have rates below 10%.
Malaysia also does relatively poorly on other measures of malnutrition. On childhood wasting — when a child’s weight is too low for their height — it has one of the highest rates in the region.
The country is off track or worsening on most global nutrition targets.
January 15
In 2021, around 1.25 million people died from diarrheal diseases. Around a third of these deaths were children.
Two main factors explain why so many children still die from diarrhea, especially in poor countries: the persistence of risk factors such as poor sanitation and unsafe water, and the lack of access to effective treatment.
Here, I want to focus on the second factor: access to a particularly effective treatment, known as oral rehydration therapy (ORT), which is essentially a mixture of clean water, salts, and sugar. Simple as it may sound, researchers writing in the medical journal The Lancet called ORT “potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century.”
The chart shows how often this treatment is used in a selection of African countries. This is based on household surveys asking caregivers of children under five who recently had diarrhea whether they received ORT.
There are large gaps: in Chad and Cameroon, fewer than one in five children with diarrhea received the treatment. This reflects a mix of challenges, including low awareness of its benefits and expensive or inconsistent supply.
Importantly, though, the chart also shows that rates are much higher in Sierra Leone, where around 85% of children received ORT. This shows that much higher coverage is possible. Sierra Leone has implemented several successful policies, including free treatment for children.
Not every child with diarrhea needs this treatment — some recover without it, depending on their health and circumstances. But ORT is cheap, safe, and easy to give. In low-income settings, especially, offering it widely as a cheap preventive measure can make a big difference for those who need it.
