World Statistics - Topics

Which countries are smaller than the city next door? Statistics offices that answer to the government versus independent ones: what changes in the numbers World merchandise trade volumes have plateaued since 2008 Life expectancy at birth is not how long a baby born today will live Happiness indexes and ease of doing business rankings: the problem with composite indicators Which country spans the most time zones and why? The UN's low and high fertility variants produce a two billion person gap by 2100 Which countries depend most on trade as a share of GDP? How much of the population growth forecast depends on assumptions about Africa Number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths: why the reported totals diverged so wildly by country The IMF's data gaps: which countries simply do not report on time How many countries does the equator actually pass through? The difference between de facto and de jure population and why it changes city counts The SDG indicator framework: 231 indicators and the countries that cannot report most of them Can poverty statistics be trusted when census coverage is patchy? Trial censuses and why some countries publish population figures that nobody believes What happens when a country uses its own national classification instead of the international one Global GDP in nominal and PPP terms tells two different stories The poor are missing from household surveys and so are the numbers How a census reaches people with no fixed address Class size research: do smaller classes raise achievement? Trade balances are widely misread as scoreboards Why the IHR core capacity scores of many countries have barely moved in two decades China remains the world's largest goods exporter by a wide margin IMF growth forecasts are revised constantly and still miss How do analyst desks read an election result that contradicts the exit polls? China's provincial GDP figures and the long-running doubts about their consistency Post-enumeration surveys: how statisticians estimate how many people they missed Why global migration statistics are always years out of date Why countries still run a full census when population registers could count everyone Which countries host the largest share of the world's migrant population? How the World Bank's poverty line of 2.15 dollars a day was set