Featured

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. China's manufacturing output in 2024 reached $4.66 trillion, more than the entire European continent's $3.61 trillion combined, a continent that spans more than 40 countries. In the treemap accompanying this article, where each cell's area represents output rather than land mass, China occupies a rectangle larger than

Who Really Charges Companies the Most Tax? Every country sets a headline rate of tax that companies pay on their profits — the government's cut before a business can call the money its own. Line up these rates across the world and you get less a map of taxation and more a map of national

Every country drawn to scale by Everything Econ. The United States alone is worth $77.95 trillion in listed equity, more than China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Canada, the United Kingdom and France combined, which together add up to roughly $60.45 trillion. That single comparison, visible in the treemap accompanying this article where

Why Some Countries Pay So Much More to Borrow Money When a country's central bank sets its main interest rate, it isn't just tweaking mortgages and savings accounts — it's setting the price of borrowing for the whole economy, from government bonds to business loans. A high rate usually means a central bank is fighting

The Countries Spending Way More Than They Earn A budget deficit is simple in principle: a government spends more in a year than it collects in taxes and other revenue, and the gap has to be borrowed or covered some other way. Economists usually measure the size of that gap against GDP — the total

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