Latest

Long-run trends in military spending and personnel: four key facts from new data

Do most countries devote resources to maintain armies even when they are not immersed in a critical conflict? How are military capabilities changing in the 21st century?

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

The missing economic measure: wealth

Gross domestic product (GDP) is increasingly seen as an incomplete measure of economic activity. Another measure gaining traction as a supplement to GDP is national wealth.

Sandra Tzvetkova and Cameron Hepburn

Shrink emissions, not the economy

Decoupling emissions from the economy is possible.

Guest Authors

How and why should we study ‘economic complexity’?

The Economic Complexity Index offers insights into how diversified and sophisticated a country's export profile is. This matters for economic growth and development potential.

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Diana Beltekian

Learning for our Millennium? The changing face of education access, quality and uptake in Ethiopia

Understanding education challenges and progress in Ethiopia through the Young Lives Study.

Guest Authors

Definitions of world regions

Which countries make up the world regions commonly used in our charts?

Our World in Data team

A sense of units and scale for electrical energy production and consumption

How does the electricity output of different sources compare?

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser

How new vaccines can help with our antibiotic dependence

New vaccination technology could reduce our reliance on antibiotics.

Samantha Vanderslott

How many people does synthetic fertilizer feed?

Hannah Ritchie

Are emerging economies deindustrializing too quickly?

As today’s developed countries grew richer, they experienced a process of “structural transformation”. Are developing countries following a similar process?

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Nicolas Lippolis

Is organic really better for the environment than conventional agriculture?

Depending on the measure, organic farming can sometimes have higher environmental impacts than conventional farming.

Hannah Ritchie

How much of the world’s land would we need in order to feed the global population with the average diet of a given country?

There are large differences in the land of different diets, mostly depending on how much meat people eat.

Hannah Ritchie

Historical poverty reductions: more than a story about “free-market capitalism”

The reduction of poverty has also happened because public spending and redistribution have increased significantly.

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

Income inequality and happiness inequality: a tale of two trends

How could it be that happiness inequality falls with rising income inequality?

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

Collective pessimism and our inability to guess the happiness of others

We tend to underestimate the average happiness of people around us. One possible explanation is that we are positive about ourselves, but negative about those we don't know.

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

Life expectancy: what does this actually mean?

How is life expectancy calculated, and what does it mean? What’s the difference between period and cohort life expectancy?

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

Yields vs. land use: how the Green Revolution enabled us to feed a growing population

Crop yields across the world have increased dramatically over the last half-century. But has this kept up with a growing population?

Hannah Ritchie

Is globalization an engine of economic development?

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

What was the death toll from Chernobyl and Fukushima?

When we think of nuclear safety, two accidents often come to mind: Chernobyl and Fukushima. What was the death toll and impact of these disasters?

Hannah Ritchie

Not all deaths are equal: How many deaths make a natural disaster newsworthy?

How many deaths make a natural disaster newsworthy?

Sandra Tzvetkova

What the history of London’s air pollution can tell us about the future of today’s growing megacities

London once had local pollution levels as high as some of the most polluted cities in other parts of the world today.

Hannah Ritchie