The map shows which European countries saw an increase in population, and which saw a decrease in the year from July 2022 to 2023.

The regional divide is stark: most countries with negative population change are located in the eastern and southern parts of Europe, while countries in the west and north saw population growth.

We focus on 2022–2023 as they are the most recent years in the UN’s latest World Population Prospects, published in 2024. Temporary shocks can influence year-to-year population changes, but this regional pattern is not unique to this particular year: you see it in earlier years too, and it also shows up when you look at population change over longer periods.

A key driver of this is migration. Most countries in Western and Northern Europe have had positive net migration (i.e., more people arriving than leaving). Many countries in Eastern and Southern Europe, in contrast, have had more people leaving than arriving.

Fertility rates have been declining across Europe, and all of these countries now have rates below the replacement level. That means that across much of Europe, since deaths now exceed births, the population would be shrinking without migration. In Western and Northern Europe, positive net migration has been offsetting this.

It’s a widespread view that child deaths are still a pressing problem in poorer countries, but not in rich ones.

I don’t think this is true, and I want to illustrate it with one example from the United States.

In 2023, 30,200 children died in the US. In the same year, 22,800 Americans of any age were killed through homicide. You can see this in the chart.

Few Americans would argue that murders are a “solved problem”. And this is certainly not what you’d take away from the news. As we showed in a recent article, homicides receive disproportionate coverage in both left- and right-leaning media, relative to the number of people who die from them.

The everyday tragedies of children dying from preterm births, neonatal sepsis, and asphyxia do not get nearly the same attention, but are no less important. These are problems that we can still make more progress on.

We just lived through the period with the fastest population growth in human history. Six decades ago, there were three billion people on our planet. Since 2022, there have been more than eight billion people — an increase of five billion over this period.

It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace with population growth. But as the chart above shows, they grew even faster. On every continent, food supplies — measured by calories — grew faster than the population. This rise in food production per person was a major reason for the decline of extreme poverty and hunger.

To us, this chart documents one of humanity’s most extraordinary achievements.

A note on the data: Food supply estimates come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. We adjusted them to account for changes in region definitions and data coverage over time.

The economist Paul Krugman once said, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it’s almost everything”. When workers can produce more value in the same amount of time, economies can grow faster, and living standards can rise.

The chart shows the productivity metric published by the Penn World Table for South Korea and Japan. It measures gross domestic product (GDP) per hour of work.

Since 2000, South Korea’s productivity has more than doubled, narrowing what was once a vast gap with Japan. It has now even surpassed its neighbor.

Many forces affect productivity, but one stands out in Korea’s case: its commitment to innovation. The country spends nearly 5% of GDP on research and development, among the highest shares in the world, and it files far more patents per million people than any other nation.

What does the British government spend its budget on? The chart shows spending broken down by category, scaled to £100. It combines both central and local government spending.

Social protection is the single largest item. Out of every £100 spent, £33 goes to it — more than health, at £19 per £100. The UK is typical in this regard — in every OECD country except the US, social protection is the biggest category.

Public services also account for a large share: £14 per £100. These include core government functions, foreign aid, and interest payments on government debt.

Education and economic affairs, which support the broader economy or specific industries such as fishing and manufacturing, are also prominent categories.

Since 2000, GDP per capita has doubled in all three Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (where it has nearly tripled).

Living conditions in these countries have improved more broadly. Poverty rates are lower, and life satisfaction is higher. Incomes have not just doubled in terms of GDP per capita; median incomes have also doubled.

This Data Insight is the third of a three-part series on China’s role in global trade, drawing on new writing we added this week to our Trade and Globalization topic page.

China is the top source of imports for many countries. But this tells us only how China compares with other trading partners, not how large these imports are relative to the size of each country’s economy. That is what this map shows.

The map plots the total value of merchandise imports from China as a share of each importing country’s GDP. The data shows that Chinese imports are relatively small when compared with the overall size of the importing economy.

Take the Netherlands as an example: China is the country’s leading source of imports. But compared with the size of the whole Dutch economy, this is a comparatively small amount — about 10% as a share of GDP. And as the map shows, the Netherlands is at the high end, largely because it imports a lot overall.

In many countries, imports from China account for much less than 10% of GDP. There are a few reasons for this. First, even if China is the leading partner, most countries still import from a wide range of places. And second, in most countries, the economic value produced domestically is larger than the total value of imported goods.

This Data Insight is the second of a three-part series on China’s role in global trade, drawing on new writing we added this week to our Trade and Globalization topic page.

China’s central role in merchandise trade is the result of a large change that has taken place in just a few decades. This change has been especially large in Africa and South America.

In 1990, most African countries imported mainly from Europe, and most South American imports came from North America. Today, Asia is the top source of imports for both regions, primarily due to the rapid growth of trade with China.

The chart here focuses on Ethiopia, a country that illustrates this shift. Home to around 130 million people, it is one of Africa’s largest countries and has experienced rapid economic growth in recent decades.

In the early 1990s, over 40% of Ethiopia’s imports came from Europe, while very little came from China. Since then, the roles of China and Europe have almost reversed: imports from China now account for one-third of Ethiopia’s total imported goods.

This Data Insight is the first of a three-part series on China’s role in global trade, drawing on new writing we added this week to our Trade and Globalization topic page.

Over the past two decades, China’s role in global trade has expanded substantially. It has become a central hub, particularly through growing relationships with many lower and middle-income countries.

The map here shows how China ranks as a source of imports into each country. A rank of 1 means that China is the largest source of merchandise goods (by value) that a country buys abroad.

In 2024, China was the top source of imported goods for around two-thirds of countries worldwide. This includes nearly all of Asia, much of Africa and Latin America, and parts of Europe.

In many countries, China has overtaken the United States as the largest origin of their imported goods. This shift has occurred relatively recently, mainly over the past two decades.

Despite the world’s immense progress against child mortality, in some of the poorest countries, one in ten children still dies. That’s a level last seen in the richest countries in the middle of the 20th century.

The chart shows the nine countries, all located in Africa, where this is the reality today. In Niger, more than 11 out of every 100 children die before the age of five. In the European Union, the child mortality rate is more than twenty times lower.

In 1961, around two chickens were slaughtered per person globally each year. As many countries grew richer — and richer countries tend to eat more meat — global demand for chicken increased.

Since then, the number of chickens slaughtered per person has quadrupled. On average, 9 chickens are killed each year for every person in the world. Chickens have also become much heavier, so the amount of meat eaten in kilograms has grown even faster.

Life is short and painful for many farmed animals. Global estimates suggest that most are raised in factory farms. In the United States, around 99% of livestock comes from them.

One of the starkest expressions of global inequality is a child’s chance of survival. In 2023, 2.84 million children in Africa died before reaching their fifth birthday, giving the continent the highest child mortality rate of any region (5.9%).

The chart above shows a simple hypothesis: how many more African children would reach the age of five if it had the same child mortality rates as other regions?

If conditions in Africa improved enough to match Asia’s current child mortality rate (2%), 1.9 million of these 2.84 million children would survive.

If the child mortality rate were to drop to the European rate (0.4%), then 2.64 million children would be saved each year.

Almost 20,000 Americans were murdered in 2023.

The chart shows the homicide rates among male and female victims. Men were 2.7 times more likely to die by homicide than women.

We can see that for men, most of these murders were committed by friends, neighbors, acquaintances, or strangers (shown as “Other” in the chart) rather than a partner or family member. The opposite is true for women: intimate partners are the biggest threat.

Because the risks are different, the most effective responses may differ too. For women, reducing intimate partner violence is a key priority. For men, prevention is more often tied to crime, gangs, and violence among acquaintances or strangers.

The 1970s were a decade shaped by fears about overpopulation. As the world’s most populous country, China was never far from the debate. In 1979, China designed its one-child policy, which was rolled out nationally from 1980 to curb population growth by limiting couples to having just one child.

By this point, China’s fertility rate — the number of children per woman — had already fallen quickly in the early 1970s, as you can see in the chart.

While China’s one-child policy restricted many families, there were exceptions to the rule. Enforcement differed widely by province and between urban and rural areas. Many couples were allowed to have another baby if their first was a girl. Other couples paid a fine for having more than one. As a result, fertility rates never dropped close to one.

In the last few years, despite the end of the one-child policy in 2016 and the government encouraging larger families, fertility rates have dropped to one. The fall in fertility today is driven less by policy and more by social and economic changes.

This chart shows the total fertility rate, which is also affected by women delaying when they have children. Cohort fertility tells us how many children the average woman will actually have over her lifetime. In China, this cohort figure is likely higher than one, but still low enough that the population will continue to shrink.