World Statistics - Topics

How much should you trust a long-range seasonal forecast? Why is Latin America one region in some indexes and six in others? Who compiles the global numbers and how they fill in the gaps Global debt has never been higher in peacetime Why replacement level fertility is 2.1 children and not 2 Language maps: why counting speakers by country is so unreliable How many foreign visitors France vs the United States receives each year Projecting populations to 2100 and where the models disagree How reliable are century-old temperature records from colonial weather stations? Which diseases still kill the most people worldwide and where are they concentrated? Multidimensional poverty measures capture what income never will Air pollution now rivals smoking as a global health risk — how is that even counted? What makes a record official vs just impressive? Why maternal mortality numbers vary so wildly between different sources Who gets to decide what counts as development progress How the SDG indicators were chosen and what they leave out Which SDG indicators are measurable and which are just aspiration? ISIC vs NAICS: why industry statistics never line up across borders The gap between national poverty lines and the numbers the World Bank publishes Why poverty data from conflict zones is often years out of date What development reports keep leaving out of the countries they rank Why do climate models disagree about the end of the century? Counting the poor by income vs counting them by consumption: why it matters Why famine declarations always come so late and what is supposed to trigger them Why the SDGs are behind schedule on nearly every single target The problem of comparing statistics from countries that barely collect them Why poverty headcounts get revised years after they are published How purchasing power parity changes the ranking of the world's economies The politics of an indicator: how a number turns into a global target Counting people is harder than it sounds where there is no census Do conflict death tolls count people who die of hunger and disease instead of bullets? The gap between what a model predicts and what the real world does is where the real questions are