Tag Archives: Stacked bar chart

Chart idea: Comparative Stacked Bars

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The Stacked Bar chart is one of my favourites, I even made the same stacked bar chart with 9 online tools – but it has one major weakness, it’s difficult to compare changes of its segments over time. I tried finding a way to improve it and here let me introduce the Comparative Stacked Bars:

Comparative Stacked Bars

Triangles show the absolute increase or decrease of each segment. They are colour-coded to make it even easier to read.

It’s limitations:

  • Too many is too many – if there are too many categories the triangles will make the chart look messy and difficult to read. But even more difficult it would be without triangles.
  • Too small is too small – if the change is too small the triangle might become invisible. But without them, the changes would get invisible much sooner – just observe the top segment in the above chart.

The example above was made in R, and the example below was made in Tableau. Unfortunately I have no not-overly-complicated solution for Excel. If anyone knows how to implement it properly, please let me know!

What are the most dominating cities in their countries?

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What are the most dominating cities in their countries?

San Juan metro area accounts for more than 3 quarters of the population of Puerto Rico. Same with the Kuwait City metro area in Kuwait.

What: Population distribution between the largest city, the urban area without the largest city, and the rural population. Metro area is meant by the largest city in most cases.
When: 2019
Where: Top ranking countries except one-city countries (like Singapore) from the whole world. Some countries with a total of 26 million inhabitants were excepted because they do not have needed statistics in the Worldbank database. Many of them are small, possibly one-city countries.
Source: Worldbank for numbers, Wikipedia for names.

Which type of waste is best recycled or refilled?

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Which type of waste is best recycled or refilled?

Metallic and glass waste. It’s probably quite easy to reuse metal and refill glass containers.
The least recycled are mixed ordinary wastes of which almost half are generated by households (as seen in the previous chart).

May it be the motivation for sorting – if more mixed waste became recyclable waste, more would be … recycled.

What: Waste recycled or refilled in total waste generated.
When: 2016
Where: Europe
Source: Eurostat

Is oil the main reason of changes in GDP in Africa

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Is oil the main reason of changes in GDP in Africa?

I was deceived!

I saw that Equatorial Guinea, the African country that increased its GDP per capita the most during 1980-2018 had done this due to newly found oil. I saw that Gabon, the African country that decreased its GDP per capita the most during the same period, had done this due to diminishing its oil reserves. So I thought, the same applies to the most of rapidly growing (or contracting) African economies, but that is not true (except for Libya).

The sources of growth might not be very sustainable just like oil, but finding them requires a deeper analysis of every separate country.

What: GDP per capita divided into oil rents, rents from other natural resources and GDP from other sources. Grey bars indicate full GDP value with the unknown division.
When: From 1980 till 2018. Not all countries had a full range of data. No country had its GDP divided for 2018.
Where: Countries of the African continent with the biggest GDP per capita growth during 1980-2018 (top 8) and biggest fall (bottom 4, except South Sudan, which had very short data range)
Source: WB

Do electric cars emit less CO2?

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Do electric cars emit less CO2?

Many people still have doubts about whether the lower emissions of driving an electric car outweighs the additional impact on the environment caused by manufacturing the batteries.

Two studies (the latter is more trustworthy than the former) show that electric cars do help to reduce the CO2 emission. But how much – it depends.
If the batteries are produced in a country where the industry is polluting more (China), reductions will be lower. If the car is driven in a country where electricity is produced by burning things (like Estonia or Poland) the reductions will be lower or even negative.
A special case is Japan, where cars are so fuel-efficient, that electric cars even raise emissions.

So, YES, electric cars are more often better than not.

What: Top = Lifetime emissions of cars in tonnes of CO2. Bottom = Lifetime emissions of cars in grams of CO2 per 1 kilometer.
When: Top = Estimate for 2020, Bottom = Estimate for 2030 with “current technological trajectory” scenario.
Where: Top = EU countries, Bottom = selected countries of the world.
Source: Top = European Federation for Transport and Environment, Bottom = Knobloch, F., Hanssen, S., Lam, A. et al. Net emission reductions from electric cars and heat pumps in 59 world regions over time. Nat Sustain (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0488-7

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 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.

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.