Economy

Why Some Countries Still Run on the Harvest Agriculture's share of GDP measures how much of a country's total economic output comes from growing crops, raising livestock, forestry, and fishing. In wealthy economies this figure is often a rounding error, but in the world's poorest nations it can still define the entire economy. The gap

The Countries Where Money Is Losing Its Value Fastest Inflation measures how quickly prices for everyday goods are rising. When inflation is high, the same wage buys less bread, less fuel, less of everything, month after month. The World Bank's figures show just how differently this is playing out around the world right now: in

The Fields That Feed the World — Without the Rain Cereal yield measures how much grain — wheat, maize, rice and the like — a country squeezes out of each hectare of farmland it plants. It's a measure of farming intensity, not farming size: a tiny country with greenhouses and irrigation can easily out-yield a

What’s Left When a Country Stops Making Things Services now make up the biggest slice of economic output almost everywhere on Earth — everything from banking and retail to tourism, healthcare and software, as opposed to farming or factory production. The World Bank tracks this figure as a share of each country's GDP, and the

The Countries Where Money Goes Furthest When economists compare how rich nations are, they often use a measure called income per person, sometimes shown as GNI per capita. This takes a country's total income and divides it evenly across everyone who lives there. It's not a measure of fairness — it says nothing about how

Which Countries Actually Live and Die by the Factory Line? Every country sells something to the rest of the world — oil, wheat, tourism, financial services, or things built on an assembly line. This ranking looks specifically at that last category: what share of a country's total exports are manufactured goods, things like machinery, electronics,

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. Prints and downloads of Everything Econ visualisations:  Browse the print shop → Nigeria recorded 2,675,439 deaths in 2023, ranking it fourth in the world, directly behind the United States. Its median age is approximately 18 years and its crude death rate is 11.74 per 1,000, lower than

The Countries That Cannot Feed Themselves Without Foreign Help Food is the most basic of necessities, yet for many countries, a striking share of it arrives from abroad. This ranking, compiled by the World Bank, measures food imports as a percentage of a country's total merchandise imports — in other words, of everything a nation

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