Author Archives: Chart Planet

Do people invest their money?

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Do people invest their money?

Among my acquaintances, it is not very common to invest in something more sophisticated than pension funds, however, as this chart shows, in some countries more than half of the money in households are held in the form of equity, funds, bonds and other types of investments.
This data does not show how many households invest, just the amounts of money. It is very likely that only a small fraction of the richest people account for the majority of money in the types of investments I focus on.

But let’s celebrate Estonia, Hungary, USA – I believe a lot of people make conscious decisions about money there. Are they good? That’s another question.

What: Distribution of household financial assets by type.
When: 2018
Where: 36 countries form EU or OECD
Source: Data was mixed from two sources, which seem to be very consistent: Eurostat – Household financial statistics + OECD – Household financial assets

Does money spent on military means more deaths?

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Does money spent on military means more deaths?

After seeing that military spending has no visible relation to deaths in most regions I decided to investigate the special relation the USA has with the wars in the East.

Some major wars in the East are indicated on the chart. During those, the military expenditure of the USA seems to climb up. Data for deaths are available only from 1980, and I filtered out only the relevant region.

Is the USA the reason for those deaths? Or are those people just fighting among themselves, and the USA just gets involved? Does it worsens the situation, or improves? I’ll leave those questions open for now.

What: Military expenditure in constant USD + Deaths due to Conflict and Terrorism.
When: Expenditure: 1949-2018, Deaths: 1980-2017
Where: Expenditure: USA only, Deaths: Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation for deaths + Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for expenditure.

Does money spent on military means more deaths?

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Does money spent on military means more deaths?

That seems not to be the case. There are many wars in Africa, but not so much money spent. Also, China and countries in Western Europe spend a lot, however, they’re not actively fighting (some missions to some hot spots do not count).

In the Middle East – the boiling point of wars – the biggest spenders are Saudi Arabia, which fights satellite war in Yemen, and Israel which fights against Palestine (as I understand it). But many more casualties come from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, all of which seem to be a mixture of civil wars and satellite wars.

The special case is the USA which will have its separate chart.

This topic is so geopolitical, that I refrain from diving into deeper conclusions, but it’s tempting to say, that more weapons do not make more deaths. More stupidity does.

What:
> Military expenditure in constant USD – some data for USSR and UAE were interpolated using very rough methods – just to fill the gaps and avoid fake jumps. This data have lots of gaps.
> Deaths due to Conflict and Terrorism.
When: 1980-2018 (Data for deaths until 2017)
Where: Probably the whole world
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation for deaths + Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for expenditure

Where do people die from epidemics?

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Mostly in Africa. It was quite difficult to find the exact diseases behind particular spikes of deaths, but some of them like Ebola got a lot of attention. Surprising enough, but it seems that in 2017 people suddenly stopped dying from diseases there.

Sadly I could not find what caused so many deaths in China in 1984. Just imagine the results I got when I searched for “china 1994 epidemics” – the overwhelming majority of articles about the current outbreak of coronavirus with some articles claiming that Chinese government is the one from Orwell’s novel.

What: Deaths due to epidemics
When: 1980-2017
Where: 194 countries and regions
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

Where do people die from war?

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As expected, the most dangerous regions are Africa and the Middle East. However, a single event in Rwanda pushed Sub-Saharan Africa to the first place. Also, half of the deaths from 1980 till 2017 occurred in only five countries (we hear a lot about them in the news).

The rest of the world is more or less peaceful.

What: Deaths due to war and terrorism.
When: 1980-2017
Where: 194 countries and regions
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

Why do people die?

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This is a slightly deeper look into “People die from heart diseases and cancer, so don’t be afraid of terrorism or viruses” idea.

What: Distribution of death by causes.
When: 1990-2017.
Where: Global data which seems to cover most of the world.
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Global Burden of Disease Study 2017 Results.

Where do people live the healthiest lives?

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Where do people live the healthiest lives?

I have divided the countries of the world into regions and checked which of them have the highest expected percentage of a healthy life. It’s Oceania followed by East Asia. It would be great to live in Fiji, Tonga or Samoa!

But behold how diverse are the African countries and how homogenous are those from Europe!

What: Healthy life expectancy (HALE) divided by total life expectancy at birth – I’d call it the expected percentage of life to be healthy. Those strange charts show distribution – the wider it is the more values are there. HALE is a form of health expectancy that applies disability weights to health states to compute the equivalent number of years of good health that a newborn can expect.
When: 2015
Where: 183 countries and territories.
Source: FAO

Can we buy health?

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Can we buy health?

What: indicated on the charts. Healthy life expectancy (HALE) is used for calculations. HALE is a form of health expectancy that applies disability weights to health states to compute the equivalent number of years of good health that a newborn can expect.
When: all charts are 2017, except the last one which is 2015 because this is the latest data for HALE.
Where: 189 countries and territories of the world.
Source: FAO.

Which region feeds the world?

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These are the trade flows between regions of the world measured in dollars. Strange enough – Africa does not provide much food for other regions. I have heard rumours, that Africans starve because they export all the food for rich Europeans! Maybe that’s not true, or maybe there is something specific about the trade flows measured. But according to this data, the Americas feed the world, and Asia is the one being fed.

What: Export of food items, measured in USD. Trade flows inside the region are eliminated.
When: 2017
Where: 243 countries and territories divided into 6 regions, of which Antarctica was not displayed.
Source: FAO

Does the USA dominate the world?

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Well, there are some areas where the USA dominates the world. For example, they collect the majority of the money we spend on movies because they have Hollywood. They had almost half of one million most popular websites on the internet. Also, USD is the most traded world currency which takes almost half of the total traded value. Having in mind that one act of currency exchange requires two currencies we can safely assume, that almost all trades involved USD from one side or another.

Surprisingly (at least for me) it does not have the largest army, it is not the biggest CO2 producer, not the biggest car producer.
Do you know any other indicators where the USA dominates the world?

What, When, Source:
GDP in constant 2010 USD, 2018, WB
Daily average of OTC foreign exchange turnover, 2019, BIS
Market capitalization of stock exchanges by country, December 2019, WFE
Military expenditure in constant 2017 USD, 2018, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
945 472 of one million Alexa’s top-ranked websites by country, 2012, pingdom.com
Total worldwide box office by country of movie production, 2019, the-numbers.com – very unreliable data, as written in the source itself – beta version.

How much do Tibet and other autonomous regions contribute to China?

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Apparently those large provinces where Tibetans and Uyghurs live are scarcely populated and less developed, so they contribute only a tiny fraction to the population and GDP in China. All other autonomous regions are inhabited mostly by Han Chinese who make more than half of the population there. Mongolia does not look like Mongolia when only 17% of inhabitants are Mongols.

A bit of sadness after seeing this.

What: Population, GDP in current USD, area in km2, ethnic composition and Human Development Index.
When: 2017
Where: Mainland China and its autonomous regions. Mainland China does not include Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
Source: All data was found on Wikipedia. Let’s hope it’s correct.

Where do people die from natural disasters?

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Natural disasters seem to be quite concentrated, more than half of all deaths during 1980-2017 have occurred in the same five countries and four of those five are in Asia. It is not possible to differentiate to smaller regions (like S.E. Asia, East Asia etc.) because a single tsunami or earthquake affects several regions at once.

The earthquake in Haiti seem to be the most deadly disaster for a single country, which makes up more than half of total deaths in Americas.

What: Deaths due to natural disasters
When: 1980-2017
Where: 194 countries and regions
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

Which Korea is the best Korea?

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We knew what to expect here, but it’s interesting to see it. The only thing unexpected to me is that South Korea has significantly more people. I thought it’s only a bit more.

What: 4 different indicators indicated on the infographic. HDI for North Korea was adjusted because the methodology has changed since its HDI was last published.
When: Most indicators are for 2018, but the scarcity of data for North Korea forced me to use varying years for HDI and GDP.
Where: The 2 Koreas
Source: CIA, UNDP, UESCAP, W, WB, EIU and https://countryeconomy.com

Which China is the best China?

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I am not sure if everyone is aware that there are 5 countries in this world where the majority of people could be considered Chinese. How different are those Chinas? The people’s Republic of China is the biggest one, however it is less developed compared to other Chinas, and infamously less democratic. Hong Kong, Singapore and Macao are 100% urban populations because those Chinas are basically one-city countries. The Republic of China better known as Taiwan seems like a normal usual country – not too big, not too small.

To understand better differences between these countries, I encourage the reader to dive deeper into cultural, historical and even linguistic differences between these countries.

By the way, Australia, Canada, UK and USA are also very different countries!

What: 4 different indicators indicated on the infographic
When: Time varies between 2017 and 2018 for different indicators and different Chinas
Where: The 5 Chinas
Source: CIA, UNDP, W, WB, IMF, EIU – most sources did not provide data for all 5 Chinas, so the data for one indicator might be gathered from various sources or even estimated by the author.