Everything Econ

Why Some Countries Pay So Much More to Borrow Money When a country's central bank sets its main interest rate, it isn't just tweaking mortgages and savings accounts — it's setting the price of borrowing for the whole economy, from government bonds to business loans. A high rate usually means a central bank is fighting […]

The Countries Spending Way More Than They Earn A budget deficit is simple in principle: a government spends more in a year than it collects in taxes and other revenue, and the gap has to be borrowed or covered some other way. Economists usually measure the size of that gap against GDP — the total

Who’s Really Drowning in Debt? Debt-to-GDP measures how much a country owes compared with everything its economy produces in a year. It's the standard yardstick for judging whether a government's borrowing is manageable or spiralling — though, as this ranking shows, a high number doesn't always mean a country is in trouble, and a low

The Countries Where Filling Up Hurts the Most Petrol prices vary wildly around the world, and the gap has nothing to do with how much oil a country actually produces. Some of the world's biggest oil producers sell petrol for pennies a litre, while wealthy, oil-poor nations charge several dollars for the same amount. This

Which Country Is Secretly the Wealthiest on Earth? When economists want to compare how rich countries are, they don't just look at the total size of an economy — a big population can make a country's economy huge even if most people are poor. Instead, they divide a country's total economic output by its number

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. India's population aged 15 to 64 reached 994.7 million in 2025, overtaking China's 987.4 million for the first time on record. Yet on the treemap accompanying this article, sized by actual labour force rather than population, China's rectangle is still comfortably the largest in the world: 768.1

Which Countries Sell More to the World Than They Buy? Every year, economists tally up what a country sells to the rest of the world against what it buys — exports of goods and services minus imports, plus a few other cross-border flows like investment income. The result is the "current account balance," usually expressed

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. China's economy, adjusted for purchasing power, is now roughly 37% larger than the United States' — $44.3 trillion against $32.4 trillion — even though the US remains the world's largest economy when measured at market exchange rates. That gap is the central distortion in the treemap accompanying

The Countries Outpacing Everyone Else in 2026 Every year, the International Monetary Fund forecasts how much each country's economy is expected to grow, measured as the change in real GDP — the total value of goods and services a country produces, adjusted so that rising prices don't get mistaken for genuine growth. Line up all