Economy

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

Who’s Shouldering the Heaviest Load? Every country has people who work and people who don't — children too young for jobs, and older people who've left the workforce. The dependency ratio measures how many of these non-working dependants exist for every 100 people of working age. A ratio near 20 means a country is mostly

Who Actually Gets a Seat at the Table? Every country elects or appoints a parliament, but who sits in those seats varies enormously. The "women in parliament" measure simply tracks the share of seats held by women in each country's national legislature, based on World Bank and Inter-Parliamentary Union data. Some countries have pushed that