Today
Many countries are in a fairly unique demographic position in history: their populations are shrinking not due to a temporary shock but to sustained structural decline.
If we look at the United Nations’ population estimates and medium projections, 66 countries and territories had already passed peak population this year. Almost all of them are in Europe and East Asia.
But there is one country in Southeast Asia in this position: Thailand. As you can see in the chart, the UN projects that its population will continue to fall throughout this century.
This is the result of a rapid drop in fertility rates. In 1970, women in Thailand had an average of 6 children; twenty years later, that had fallen to 2. This was as fast as China’s decline. Today, the rate is at most 1.2 children per woman, and some national statistics put it closer to 1.
What makes Thailand unusual is that this happened while it was still a relatively poor country. In 1970, it launched its National Family Planning Program. This was voluntary and non-coercive, but effectively increased contraceptive use, family planning access, and education levels for women.
August 20
In the 1970s, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution asking developed countries to contribute at least 0.7% of their national income to foreign aid. Most countries signed off on this goal, except for Switzerland and the United States.
But very few countries have met this target in the fifty years since then. Even today, only a handful of countries do.
In 2023, five countries met this target: Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark. Two years on, this has dropped to four, as Germany’s contribution shrank to 0.6%.
As you can see in the chart, other developed countries give less than 0.7% of their national income.
August 18
Guyana, a small country in South America, has seen the fastest growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world over the past decade.
This is illustrated in the chart, which shows GDP per capita for Guyana and several other countries, based on estimates from the World Bank.
The data is adjusted for inflation, so Guyana’s sharp growth is not due to price changes over time.
A large and sudden expansion in oil production has driven most of this growth. Between 2020 and 2025, the country’s oil production grew 860%, making it a key contributor to global crude oil supply growth.
Before oil extraction started, Guyana’s GDP per capita was well below the global average. It is now more than three times higher.
It’s too early to see the full effects of this, and hard to measure how far the oil boom has translated into better living standards in the country. Official poverty estimates, for example, have not been published since production began. But there is early evidence of the government channeling oil revenue toward citizens, for instance, through cash grants for every adult, free tuition at public universities, and increasing health spending.
August 15
Rich countries spend, on average, the equivalent of $7,300 per person on healthcare each year. This includes public and private expenditures.
In low-income countries, the equivalent is only around $125 per person.
This is based on spending data from the World Health Organization’s Global Health Observatory, which you can see in the chart across levels of income. The data is adjusted for differences in living costs between countries.
That means rich countries spend around 60 times as much per person on healthcare as the poorest countries.
This resource gap is one of the reasons for the stark differences in health outcomes. The average life expectancy is around 16 years lower in poorer countries, and other health measures, such as child mortality, maternal mortality, and disease burden, tend to be far worse.
August 13
Many countries have been facing intense heat this summer, and with predictions of a strong El Niño on the way, next summer could be even hotter. This has ignited debate on the need for cooling methods and technologies — most prominently, air conditioning (AC).
But how do rates of air conditioning usage vary across the world? Large international comparisons are hard to come by, but the International Energy Agency just published some new estimates for a select number of countries and regions.
The chart shows the estimated share of households with AC in 2025.
In Japan and the United States, AC adoption is almost universal; at least 90% of households have it. Most households in China also have AC; this share has increased rapidly over the past decade.
Adoption rates in Southeast Asia, Europe, and India are far lower, but for different reasons. In lower-middle-income countries like India, the reasons are often economic: AC would bring huge benefits, but many households cannot afford the upfront cost or the power to run it. Much of Southeast Asia faces a similar barrier.
In many European countries, it’s less of an economic barrier and more of a historical and cultural one. AC was not seen as a necessity because heatwave events were less frequent and intense than they are today. That is changing, and will continue to do so as the planet warms.
August 11
Most high-income countries have reduced road deaths substantially over the past decades. But the United States has made much less progress than other rich countries, and has even gone backward since the mid-2010s.
In this chart, I compare the trends for the US and a selection of other high-income countries to illustrate this point.
Consider Germany, which provides a useful comparison. In 1980, the US had about 25 road deaths per 100,000 people, and Germany had 22. But in the decades that followed, Germany’s rate fell steadily, while the US rate declined more slowly, and even rose again. In 2023, the last year in the data, the US rate was more than 4 times Germany’s.
In 2024, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the US published a report that traces the gap to a mix of road-safety measures that other rich countries use more widely, such as speed and red-light cameras or lower limits where people walk.
There’s also a connection with how much Americans use their cars. In the US, people drive much more. However, that doesn’t fully explain the gap — US roads are also significantly more dangerous than those in Germany per kilometer traveled.
August 8
What we pay for something in a shop often doesn’t reflect its true cost. Producing goods causes damage through carbon emissions that drive climate change, but the receipts for that damage rarely show up in the price. The costs are often hidden and diffuse, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
One way to make people pay the full cost is to introduce a carbon price. This can take the form of a carbon tax or a trading system, which caps emissions and lets companies buy and sell permits.
Many countries now do this. Around 30% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions have a carbon price. In the chart, you can see that this has doubled in the last decade. The biggest part of this rise came from China’s introduction of a trading system in its electricity sector.
While more and more of the world’s production has a carbon price, most prices are incredibly low. In a recent article, we showed that most priced emissions were valued at $10 or lower. That’s well below most estimates of the “social cost of carbon”, which tend to be greater than $100 per tonne.
Simply having a carbon price is not enough. It also needs to be high enough to change what people buy and make low-carbon alternatives worth investing in.
