Economy

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

Where One in Three People Can’t Find a Job Unemployment sounds like a simple number: the share of people who want to work, are actively looking, but can't find a job. Yet line up the countries with the highest rates and the picture that emerges is anything but simple — it's a map of collapsed

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. Want this chart on your wall? Print it at home, or order the museum-quality version. Instant download · £3.99Printed poster · £12.99 On the treemap accompanying this article, India's rectangle is the largest on the page at roughly 3.07 million personnel, ahead of China's 2.54 million. Most

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. Want this chart on your wall? Print it at home, or order the museum-quality version. Instant download · £3.99Printed poster · £14.99 China's rectangle on the treemap holds 1.04 billion internet users. India's, immediately next to it, holds 696.6 million. Together the two countries account for 36.5%