Population

When the Countryside Quietly Empties Out Some countries aren't shrinking overall — they're just hollowing out in the middle. This ranking tracks how fast each country's rural population is growing or shrinking each year, using World Bank data. A sharply negative number means villages and small towns are losing people fast, usually because they're moving

Why Some Cities Are Bursting at the Seams While Others Empty Out Every year, the World Bank tracks how fast the urban population of each country is growing — that is, how quickly people are moving into or being born in cities relative to the year before. A country near the top isn't necessarily getting

The Countries Where Almost No One Is a Child or a Pensioner Every country has people who are too young or too old to work, and people who are squarely in their working years — usually counted as those aged 15 to 64. That balance shapes everything from how many taxpayers support each pensioner to

The Countries Everyone Is Leaving, and the Ones Everyone Is Reaching Net migration measures the balance between people arriving in a country and people leaving it in a single year. A positive number means more people moved in than moved out; a negative number means the reverse. It sounds like a simple scoreboard of winners

The Country Where One City Is the Whole Story Imagine if nearly everyone who lived in a city lived in the same city. That's what this measure captures: how much of a country's urban population is concentrated in its single largest city, rather than spread across a network of regional centres. A high score means

The Countries Where Almost Everyone Still Lives Outside the City Prints and downloads of Everything Econ visualisations:  Browse the print shop → Rural population share measures the percentage of people living outside cities and large towns — the countryside, small villages, farmland. In most rich, industrialised nations this figure has been shrinking for over a

Which Country Is Basically One Giant City? Prints and downloads of Everything Econ visualisations:  Browse the print shop → Urbanisation sounds like a dry statistic, but it answers a simple question: what share of a country's population lives in towns and cities rather than in villages and the countryside? The World Bank tracks this for

The Countries Where Teenage Motherhood Is Still the Norm Prints and downloads of Everything Econ visualisations:  Browse the print shop → Teen birth rate measures how many babies are born to every 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 in a given country each year. It's a number that captures far more than biology — it