Economy

Why Your Savings Account Pays Almost Nothing in Some Countries — and a Fortune in Others When you put money in a savings account, the bank pays you interest for the privilege of using your cash. That interest rate should, in theory, reward you for waiting rather than spending today. But in much of the

The Country Where Almost Everyone Lives on Less Than $6.85 a Day The $6.85-a-day line is the World Bank's benchmark for poverty in upper-middle-income countries — not destitution exactly, but a level of income too thin to reliably cover food, housing, healthcare and a bit of margin for shocks. Measured this way, global poverty looks

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. Prints and downloads of Everything Econ visualisations:  Browse the print shop → China produced 25,916 TWh of coal in 2024, equal to 51.65% of the 50,178 TWh captured in this chart, and the treemap built from that data shows China's cell alone exceeding the combined output of

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. Prints and downloads of Everything Econ visualisations:  Browse the print shop → China generated 1,397 TWh of hydropower in 2025, more than Brazil, Canada, the United States, Russia and India combined, a group of five countries that together produced 1,354 TWh. The comparison shows up directly in

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. Prints and downloads of Everything Econ visualisations:  Browse the print shop → In the treemap accompanying this article, where cell size reflects battery-electric vehicle sales rather than geography, China's rectangle is larger than the other 59 countries in the dataset put together. China sold roughly 13.3 million

When Does an Economy’s Export Figure Beat Its Whole Income? "Living off exports" measures how much a country sells abroad compared with the total size of its economy — exports as a share of GDP. A country scoring 50% earns the equivalent of half its entire yearly output just from selling goods and services overseas.

The Countries Where More People Are Overweight Than Not Adult obesity rate measures the share of a country's adult population classified as obese — not merely overweight, but at a level of excess weight that carries serious health risks like diabetes and heart disease. Looking at this figure across the world reveals one of the

Where Paying Your Own Hospital Bill Is Just Normal Life Most people in rich countries barely think about who pays when they see a doctor — insurance or the government quietly picks up the bulk of the bill. But across a wide swathe of the world, that safety net is thin or missing, and the

Why Some Countries Buy More Than They Make Imagine a country spending the equivalent of its entire economy on goods bought from abroad — and then some. That's the reality for this ranking, which measures a country's total imports as a share of its GDP (the value of everything it produces in a year). A

Where a Handful of Small Nations Quietly Have More Doctors Than Anywhere Else on Earth Count up how many doctors a country has for every 10,000 people, and you get a rough sense of how much medical care its population can draw on. This is a density measure, not a quality score — a high