Economy

The Countries Where Women Do Most of the Working Female labour-force participation measures something simple: what share of working-age women are employed or actively looking for work. It doesn't measure pay, job quality, or whether work is a choice — only whether women are counted as part of the paid or market-oriented workforce. On that

The Countries That Pay Their Lenders Before Anything Else When a government borrows money from abroad, it has to pay that money back in foreign currency, usually dollars. The only way to get that currency is to earn it, mainly by selling things to other countries. The "debt-service ratio" measures how much of that export

The Countries Where Health Eats the Biggest Slice of the Economy When economists measure health spending as a share of GDP, they're asking a simple question: out of everything a country produces and earns in a year, how much gets ploughed into hospitals, doctors, medicines and health insurance? It's a measure of national priority and

Who Gets the Biggest Slice? Ranking 83 Countries by Their Richest 10% Inequality can be measured many ways, but one of the simplest is this: what share of a country's total income goes to the richest 10% of its people? The World Bank tracks exactly this across 83 countries, and the results split the world

Why Some Countries Can’t Put Their Young People to Work Youth unemployment measures the share of people aged roughly 15 to 24 who want a job and are actively looking for one, but can't find it. It's a different number from overall unemployment, and often a much starker one, because young people are usually the

Who’s Actually Happy Right Now, and Who Isn’t Every year, researchers ask people in nearly every country the same simple question: on a scale of 0 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life? The answers, combined with data on income, health, social support and freedom, produce the World Happiness Report's ranking of 146

The Desert Farms Beating the World’s Breadbaskets When you think of top farmland, you probably picture the rolling wheat belts of the American Midwest or the rice paddies of Asia. But rank the world by grain yield — how many kilograms of grain a single hectare of farmland produces — and the leaderboard flips on