Tracking who trades with whom around the world

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 mostly high-income countries, brings together data on family life and family policy in its Family Database, which covers its members, EU countries, and some partner countries.

One of its indicators is the share of children born outside of marriage, meaning births where the mother was not legally married at the time. The OECD collects these figures from national statistical offices and Eurostat.

In 1970, fewer than one in ten children were born outside of marriage in 20 of the 25 countries with data for that year and 2023. The share has risen in all 25 since then — in Spain, it went from 1.4% to 50%.

Most countries don’t have long-term figures on how many couples live together unmarried, which makes this indicator one of the few ways to follow that change over decades.

I recently updated the chart with the OECD’s release from October 2025. For most countries, the data used to end in 2020 and now goes to 2023, and to 2024 for five of them. Colombia is in the data for the first time, from 1998 onward, and has the highest share of all. In 2023, 87% of births there were to mothers who weren’t married.

The World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) is the official source used to track the UN’s goal of ending extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $3 a day.

This data comes from household surveys in which people are asked about their income or what they spend. The World Bank has more than 2,500 of these datasets from 172 economies.

About one in ten people worldwide live on less than $3 a day. It’s a very low line, which is why the chart shown here also splits each world region into people living on $3 to $10, $10 to $30, and more than $30 a day.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank estimates that 43% of people are in extreme poverty this year. In South Asia, fewer than 2% are, but more than 80% live on $3 to $10 a day. Around 80% of the world lives on less than $30 a day, roughly the poverty line in high-income countries.

I recently updated our charts with the latest PIP release, which adds four new surveys for India, Uganda, Moldova, and Switzerland. The update covers dozens of our charts, as well as two data explorers.

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, publishes yearly figures on cancer screening for 36 European countries, going back to 2000. They cover breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer, the three that national screening programs across Europe look for.

This data is collected via each country’s screening program. Countries then report it through a joint questionnaire from Eurostat, the OECD, and the World Health Organization. The questionnaire uses a common definition that counts someone as screened if they have had a test in the last two years (or three, for cervical cancer).

The chart here shows data for cervical cancer screening among women aged 20 to 69. Sweden screened 83% of them in 2024, and Hungary 6.5%.

I recently updated this data, which now has estimates for 2023 and 2024 for most countries, plus 2025 for the seven that have reported it so far. Spain, Portugal, and Moldova are in it for the first time. So is the United Kingdom, with figures from 2000 to 2019. The update covers all four of our charts on cancer screening.

Some countries also use their own age ranges. Sweden, for example, screens women for breast cancer between 40 and 74 instead of 50 and 69. Eurostat flags that roughly a quarter of the values follow a different definition like this.

In 2015, every country in the United Nations agreed on the same 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 — among them, ending extreme poverty everywhere, getting every girl and boy through primary and secondary school, and bringing safe drinking water to every household. The UN tracks progress on all 17 in one place, the SDG Indicators Database.

The UN collects the numbers from the agency responsible for each subject — the World Health Organization for health, the International Labour Organization for work, etc. — then publishes them against definitions every country has agreed to. A household counts as living in a slum, for instance, if it lacks any one of five things: improved water, sanitation, enough living space, durable housing, and secure tenure.

The framework covers 234 indicators across 274 countries and territories, and some series reach back to the 1960s. We publish this data in our SDG Tracker, which has a page for each of the 17 goals. We have refreshed it with the latest release, which updated 261 of our charts, covering everything from hunger and schooling to water, work, cities, and oceans.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) is an intergovernmental organization with 172 countries and the European Union. Its Renewable Energy Statistics is a reference dataset on how much renewable power capacity has been installed around the world.

IRENA gathers the figures each year from national statistical offices, energy ministries, and industry associations, and fills gaps from official reports. The data covers almost every country from 2000 to 2025, broken down by technology: solar, wind, hydropower, bioenergy, geothermal, and others.

The chart shows the total solar capacity installed in each country, in gigawatts. Note that the figures are cumulative: they count every panel still in operation, not only those added in a given year.

The world added more than 500 gigawatts of solar in 2025 alone — more than twice all the solar capacity that existed anywhere in 2015. China alone accounts for half of the world’s cumulative total, with 1,200 gigawatts.

I recently updated our charts with IRENA’s July 2026 release, which adds data for 2025. In the same pass, I updated two other IRENA datasets we rely on: the cost of electricity from renewable plants, and patents in renewable energy technologies.