To understand people’s geographical distribution, we need to look at population density. How does this vary across the world?

In the past fifty years, the total fertility rate has steeply declined as a result of women’s empowerment, declining child mortality, and the rising cost of bringing up children.

Nearly one-in-four adults in the world smokes tobacco. More than one-third of men, but just over 8% of women do. How do sex differences in smoking vary across the world?

One-in-five (20%) of adults in the world smoke tobacco. But where in the world is smoking most common?

Today’s global inequality of opportunity means that the good or bad luck of where you were born matters most for your living conditions. We look at how this chance factor is the strongest determinant of your standard of living, whether in life expectancy, income, or education.

The world has made significant progress in recent decades in reducing deaths from diarrheal diseases, particularly for children. One of the most successful interventions has been oral rehydration therapy (ORT): a simple salt, water and sugar solution. We look at what ORT is, how it was developed, and how many lives it might have saved.

Rotavirus is the leading cause of diarrheal deaths in children. There is, however, an effective tool against it: the rotavirus vaccine.

Despite being treatable and preventable, 1.6 million people died from diarrheal diseases in 2017; one-third were children under five years old. This makes it one of the largest killers of children. Here we look at where and why children are dying from diarrheal diseases, and what we can do to stop this.

What effect do public attitudes have on vaccine coverage rates, and what can we do about skepticism to vaccines?

Here we look at results from the largest global survey to date on attitudes to vaccination across the world.

Most of the world’s population growth over the next century is expected to come from Africa.

An online data appendix explaining the data and methods used to estimate the historical poverty trends presented in Roser and Hasell (2021)

Many lecturers and teachers use Our World in Data in their teaching. This spans a range of levels from primary school to post-graduate university education. Matthew Cone, a US high-school teacher, shares how he uses OWID with his pupils.

Our World in Data gets lots of feedback on how our work is used by policymakers, journalists, researchers and the public. But sometimes we get feedback from people who use us in ways we could never have imagined.

Some countries have grown a lot, while others remained poor. We look at how incomes have changed around the world and why it matters.

There is a cross-country correlation between democracy and health. Is there good evidence to suggest it is causal?

Where do we find life on earth? Despite being vast, the oceans are home to just 1% of life – but the majority of animals. See how the different lifeforms are split across these global environments.

Malaria has been eliminated from large parts of Europe, the Americas, East Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean.

How is life on Earth distributed across the taxonomic kingdoms? Humans make up just 0.01% of life: but we've had much larger impacts on shaping the animal kingdom. Livestock now outweighs wild mammals and birds ten-fold.

15,000 children die on average every single day. Reducing child mortality is a key target of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). What would it take for the world to reach it?

Global demographic transition signals a shift from young, growing populations to older, stable ones, reshaping societies and economies.