Viz of the Day

Australia is running a continuous and growing deficit in total oil stocks, defying the International Energy Agency's (IEA) mandate on members to maintain 90-days of coverage and perpetuating the country’s vulnerability to swings in global oil markets. Whether global supply imbalances arise from geopolitical discord, OPEC-sanctioned supply adjustments, or other market balance factors, the fact that Australia maintains no strategic reserve and has less than a 50 day supply of oil bodes poorly for...

Corporate growth strategies typically include some combination of deepening existing market penetration and new product and market development. New market entry through acquisitions, greenfield investment, joint venture or other forms are considered generally to be the most controllable ways to drive business growth. And, many emerging markets, such as Brazil, India, Argentina, with their growing middle-classes are attractive targets for these growth strategies. With the ever-increasing...

On March 8, 2018, US president Donald Trump issued two proclamations to adjust US imports of aluminum and steel from all countries except Canada and Mexico, key regional allies and trade partners. President Trump asserted that a 25 percent tariff on steel “articles” and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum articles are necessary for the US to develop its domestic steel and aluminum industries and to protect and create jobs. The US is the world's largest importer of the steel and aluminum articles...

Ecuador has the world's highest share of nascent entrepreneurs per capita at about 30 percent of the population. This measure is known as total early-stage entrepreneurial activity (TEA). But, does this mean that Ecuador is more entrepreneurial than the United States, which has a TEA of only 14 percent? The answer depends on how we define “entrepreneur”. One key global economic growth driver is the ability of an entrepreneur to bring a concept to market, adding to national income, providing...

On Wednesday, November 15, the oldest among the longest ruling national leaders, Robert Mugabe, the 93-year-old president of Zimbabwe who has ruled the country for 37 years, was taken into custody by the country’s military. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is demanding that President Mugabe resign, despite the president’s refusal to step down ahead of next year's presidential elections. According to press reporting, the military action was in response to Mugabe firing his deputy Emmerson...

The household debt balance in the United States reached a new all-time high of $13.2 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to the latest report from the Center for Microeconomic Data of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. US household debt has risen continuously since 2013, now constituting 67 percent of US GDP and exceeding the 2008 pre-crisis level by nearly $475 billion. US household debt is indisputably large in absolute terms, now exceeding the GDP China, the world's...

Modern and legacy political and military relationships, business investment, and other factors weigh on the power of one’s passport, making the list of least and most welcoming countries globally highly dependent on your citizenship. For example, a German passport holder gains access to more countries than travelers on Chinese or Senegalese passports. However, that same German passport holder cannot visit Equatorial Guinea without a visa while a Chinese passport holder may enter. No matter...

US fertility rates hit the lowest level ever recorded during the first quarter of 2017, reflecting both biological and social changes among the population, including delaying child-bearing and electively choosing not to have children. The current downward trend started in 2007-2008 shortly before the global economic crisis, which could have affected financial resources and planning decisions, and has only recently slowed to a decrease of about 1 percent annually as of 2015. During the first...

The 104th Tour de France began July 1 in Düsseldorf, Germany and will end on the famous Champs-Elysees in Paris on July 23 after riders complete 21 stages and 3,540 km. Among the world’s most famous and prestigious cycling events, the Tour de France has been held each July since 1903.* A multi-stage race finishing in France but traversing neighboring countries, the Tour is organized around five stage types: flat, medium and high mountain, individual time, and intermediate sprint. The 2017 Tour...

Millennials are marked for their affinity with media and digital technologies and the consequent positive effect on policy and economy of cities they live in. The migration of individuals of this generation is thus of high interest to everyone from city planners and real estate agents to corporations with long supply chains to recalibrate to the demands of evolving city demographics. Millennials—those aged 17-37 years, i.e. born between the early 1980s to early 2000s—constitute roughly...

In 2016, Germany, Thailand, and Hong Kong were the top destinations for international travelers while China and the United States accounted for roughly one-third of total tourism expenditures worldwide, according to the World Tourism Organization. But, as people typically visit specific cities within a country, and not the entire country, it is far more interesting to examine city-level tourism statistics. The Global Destination Cities Index, which includes city-level data on the number of...

In 2016, the Reputation Institute ranked Sweden, Canada, and Switzerland as the most reputable countries in the world. The Institute's ranking is based on the collective opinions of 48,000 people surveyed throughout the G8* countries. According to the Reputation Institute, a country has a strong reputation if people perceive the country as having an advanced economy, appealing environment, and effective government or admire, trust, or feel esteem toward the country. These perceptions and...

In March, US President Donald Trump issued the “Energy Independence” executive order, requiring the US Environmental Protection Agency to rewrite the Clean Power Plan, a keystone of former President Obama’s efforts to address climate change. According to experts from the Trump administration, rejecting federal support for alternative energy and delaying the full transition of the US economy to renewable resources will reduce the US budget by approximately 18 percent. According to Trump, his...

The 2017 NCAA Tournament has come to the Final Four: South Carolina vs Gonzaga and Oregon vs North Carolina. To predict which teams will win the Final Four match ups and the 2017 NCAA Championship, we once again turned to the data. Knoema's prediction: North Carolina wins the NCAA championship after defeating Oregon in the Final Four and South Carolina in the championship game. We base our predictions on the Championship Tournament Statistics from the NCAA. We developed an indicator of a...

There is much love to be found in relationships between pets and their owners. And, as love influences our lives for the better, so do our pets make us happier. According to one psychological study, pet ownership improves people's happiness in a meaningful way because relationships with pets complement human relationships rather than substituting one for the other. In essence, pets increase the total happiness an owner can possibly experience. Another medical study suggests that people...

Every year Forbes publishes a list of nearly 80 people who make the world turn. The annual list is made up of presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, spiritual leaders, and some of the world's richest people. In today's viz, we share the most recent results and some of the underlying data behind the ranking. The information corresponds to the four dimensions Forbes uses to assess candidates: Power over people. Or, the ability to influence lives. This power dimension is inherent to the position of...

Deaths by drug overdose have surged in the US in recent years, reaching what some call epidemic levels in select states and among certain segments of the US population. Drug overdose deaths in the United States have increased three-fold since 1999 from roughly 17,000 deaths to about 52,500 deaths in 2015, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Over the same period, the overdose death rate increased from 6 to 16 deaths per 100,000 people, which means that it grew...

Despite a global surge in Chinese foreign direct investment during the first half of 2015, the United States remains the leading global financial power based on total foreign direct investment. During 2015, outward US net foreign direct investment (FDI) reached $345.1 billion, an amount that was not only 21.6 percent of total global financial flows but that was also almost twice the total FDI of China. Moreover, American foreign investment in 2015 was nearly five times its total value in 2005,...

Sedentary behavior has become increasingly common in modern society, resulting in a general decrease of physical activity worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines physical activity as any bodily movement including activities undertaken during leisure, work, home-based activities, and engaging in recreational pursuits. Increased urbanization, which generally increases air pollution, decreases the number of parks and sidewalks, and spurs high-density traffic, often discourages...

Millenials have overtaken Babyboomers by nearly 4 million to become the largest generation in the United States. With a current population of around 79 million, the Millenial generation is expected to grow to 81 million over the next 20 years because of migration, according to the US Census Bureau's latest estimates. The boundaries that define generations are not universally agreed, and yet these boundaries carry important implications in business and government. The size, financial security,...

Which is the world's largest economy, China or the United States? As is usual in the field of economics, “It depends.” It depends on the methods used to estimate the size of an economy and to compare one economy to another. Despite modern discussions on refining the calculation of gross domestic product (GDP), the standard measure of an economy’s size and performance, to be more inclusive of economic factors that have been ignored to date, such as environmental and natural resource depletion,...

Bitcoin is one of the world's most popular digital currencies, meaning that it is exclusively created and held electronically. But, what do we actually know about digital currencies and the potential of these currencies to replace conventional money? Like conventional money, the major function of a digital currency is to serve as a means of payment, whether that is in exchange for goods or real currency, such as dollars and euros. In addition, similar to how a normal currency's exchange rate...

In early 2015, the Google Play Market became the largest mobile application platform, surpassing Apple App Store by number of available applications. The Google Play Store currently offers 2,127,612 Android apps. The 2 million milestone was reached in March, 2.5 years after passing the 1 million threshold in July 2013. In April, 58,467 new apps were released in the official Google app store, although the monthly average is closer to 40,000 new apps. Android Market, the former name for Google...

In 2014, the State of Texas received $5.8 billion in oil and gas production taxes, more tax revenue from oil and gas production than any year since 1978. And, yet, this represented no more than 5.5 percent of the total state tax revenue in 2014, a far cry from the 25.6 percent of the budget these revenues represented back in the early 1980s. The economy of Texas has diversified since the 1980s, attracting investment from major companies in computing, engineering, transportation, and other...

Today Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, with 27,339 retail locations as of the first quarter of 2018, followed distantly by such coffee shop chains as Dunkin Donuts with about 10,000 restaurants, Tim Hortons with 4,300 outlets, and Costa Coffee with nearly 1,700 stores worldwide. Starbucks was founded in 1971 in Seattle, Washington, and incorporated on November 4, 1985 to become the publicly traded Starbucks Corporation. Based on the company's positive, sustained...

Housing affordability and its impact on middle-income households worldwide is emerging as a major concern throughout the developed world. According to the London-based consultancy Knight Frank, housing prices in the world's largest cities rose by 3 percent on average during the last year. The strongest growth was observed in Turkey where average housing prices increased by 18 percent in the last year. In contrast, across the Black Sea in the Ukraine, property prices declined by 12 percent last...

As part of the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) Energy and Financial Markets Initiative, the EIA is moving beyond its traditional coverage of the physical fundamentals of global oil markets to understand global energy prices moments. In addition to assessing factors such as energy consumption, production, inventories, spare production capacity, and geopolitical risks, EIA will now examine other influences, such as futures market trading activity, commodity investment, exchange rates,...

China’s devaluation of its national currency in early August should make foreign investment by Chinese investors relatively more attractive. Total Chinese foreign investment and construction contracts since 2005 already exceed $1.1 trillion, with new investment in 2015 on pace to top $100 billion. The question becomes: where will Chinese investors take their money next? Increased industry-based diversification could soon overtake a previous focus on geographic diversity for Chinese investments...

By June 2015, the U.S. is home to more than 320 million inhabitants. The US population is diverse in ethnic and national lines. By June 2015, 77% of population are White people, 13.2% are African Americans, 5.5% are Asians, 1.25% are native Americans, less than 1% are native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander population, and 2.5% are two or more races. Population pyramid for races has different forms. For White Americans, African Americans and native Americans the structure looks like a...

The Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) from IMF presents current figures on the value of merchandise exports and imports disaggregated according to a country's primary trading partners. Area and world aggregates are included in the display of trade flows between major areas of the world. Reported data is supplemented by estimates whenever such data is not available or current. Imports are reported on a cost insurance and freight (CIF) basis and exports are reported on a free on board (FOB)...

Since the 1950s, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy has delivered objective and globally consistent data on world energy markets. The publication has become a widely respected and authoritative publication in the field of energy economics, relied on by media outlets, academia, world governments, and energy companies alike. BP publishes a new edition each June and typically conducts a road show to launch the report in the months preceding the official release. The 2016 edition...

Published by Forbes magazine since 2003, the Forbes Global 2000 is an annual ranking of the world’s top 2000 public companies. Forbes ranks the companies according to four basic metrics: profit, sales, assets, and market value. The world's 2000 biggest public companies account for $169 trillion in total assets, $35 trillion in revenues, $2 trillion in profits, and $48 trillion in market value, according to the 2017 list.The world's largest company by market value is still Apple. The technology...

In 2014, China kept its position as the world’s largest exporter of goods for the sixth consecutive year. China's share of world exports has exceeded 12.3% - is a new record in history. United States, being the second largest merchandise exporter in terms of gross value, is the largest importer also. Net imports of goods in the US is the largest in the world in nominal terms. In 2014 net imports of goods in US was $787 bln, $610 bln more than the second-largest world’s merchandise net importer...

The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) is a forum for the travel and tourism industry - one of the world’s largest economic sectors, contributing trillions of dollars annually to the global economy, creating jobs and wealth, generating exports, boosting taxes and stimulating capital investment. WTCC is made up of members from the global business community and works with governments to raise awareness about the travel and tourism industry. It is known for being the only forum to represent...

Pressured by the western sanctions and the lower oil prices, Russian economy shows more signs of weakness. Real wages and personal incomes at the end of 2014 fell year over year for the first time since 2009. Investments continue to fall for 12 consecutive months. Russian international reserves are lower than during the global financial crisis 2008-09. Rised interest rates makes more difficult to make credit payments, overdues reached new historical highs. Revised forecasts for Russian...

The Global Youth Wellbeing Index collects youth-related data to estimate the state of young people’s wellbeing throughout the world. The Index is designed to elevate youth needs and opportunities along with young people’s participation on national and global issues. It also provides public and private sector decision-makers with a clear vision of today’s youth needs. The Index takes into account 30 countries with both high and low income from five regions, which represent nearly 70% of the...

On January 15 the Swiss National Bank, in order to fight the increasing deflation, lowered its target rates deeper in negative territory (-1.25% - -0.25%). However, at the same time SNB canceled the minimum limit, previously set for the national currency exchange rate, triggering the largest event in the FX market in recent years. The Swiss franc soared to an unprecedented 18% against the dollar in minutes annihilating capitals of those who bet on further depreciation. Currency has not seen...

Disinflationary trend in developed economies, started about 2011, continues. As latest World Bank's Data shows, inflation in developed world in December was at lowest levels since 2008-2009 financial crisis and its clearly going to enter the deflation zone soon. But industrial production, in general, keeps growing, though at a slower pace. In some countries the picture is quite different. E. g., stagflation environment (industrial production contraction accompanied by high inflation rate) can...

The oil price has fallen by more than 30% since Summer 2014. This affected everyone from producers to consumers. The visualization represents Oil Price Dynamics, Breakeven Oil Price which shows oil prices needed to meet general government expenditure and Marginal Cost of Oil Production which shows the change in total cost of producing one additional barrel of oil.World oil price at $55-$60 / barrel is less than the cost of Russian Arctic oil production, Europe and Brazil biofuels production,...

In order for the countries to perform sustainable development over times in all spheres of people's lives without imbalances adequate long-term strategic plans for the future are necessary to be elaborated. Development strategies will be of true benefit only in case if they are based on robust and reliable statistical tools, allowing to conduct comparative analysis of country's performance in all key fields of human being and over time. As of today, it is known lots of such tools most of which...

Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) Index assesses 27 European countries on how do they perform in innovation sphere and its subdivisions. By monitoring innovation progress across the EU27 member countries, as well as Iceland, Croatia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia IUS attempts to build strong base to policy discussions and decisions at EU and national level. Measurement framework of IUS embraces in total 25 indicators serving as proxies for 8...

On this page it is gathered most relevant data and information concerning education which cover essential topics and indicators of education systems of different countries throughout the world in order to enable comprehensive analysis. It is important to understand global education tendencies in order to support sustainable development. So, literacy still remains important problem since more than 40 percent of population of Sub-Saharan Africa remains illiterate accounting for almost half of the...

The Global Innovation Index (GII) recognizes the key role of innovation as a driver of economic growth and prosperity and acknowledges the need for a broad horizontal vision of innovation that is applicable to both developed and emerging economies, with the inclusion of indicators that go beyond the traditional measures of innovation (such as the level of research and development in a given country). The GII has evolved into a valuable benchmarking tool to facilitate public-private dialogue,...

In this dashboard, we integrate the most recent medium and long-term forecasts of key economic indicators for G20 countries from major international organizations, namely, the World Bank, IMF, United Nations, OECD, European Commission and the Economist Intelligence Unit. The data presented cover projections of real GDP growth, characterizing each country's output of final goods and services; consumer price inflation, as a measure of price level movements; unemployment rate, or percent of those...

The G20 CPI provides a timely measure of inflation for the G20. In the future, the G20 CPI will become part of the regular OECD monthly News Release on CPI at around one month after the reference period. Annual inflation in the G20 area was 3.0% in the year to August 2013, down from 3.2% in the year to July 2013. The G20 CPI aggregate reflects diverging patterns among the world’s largest economies. India, Argentina, Indonesia andTurkey experienced the highest annual inflation rates (equal...

Almost all technology companies are drifted their focus to mobile based products & services. By looking at the numbers of mobile penetration on developing economies, it is a perfect sense to do so. Guess, the size of difference? It is 3x in comparing with Developed Economies. Mobile Broadband subscriptions on developing economies has crossed developed economies shares. See below the distribution on Mobile, Mobile Internet, Household with computer access & internet access around the...

Choose parameter from the list to explore how cinematography industry is developing in different countries across the world. The following indicators are available: number of indoor cinemas (total and per capita), number of screens (total and per capita), total number of all feature films exhibited, total number of admissions, total number of gross box office receipts, attendance frequency per capita, average ticket price and admissions per indoor screen.Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics...

Beautiful and interesting cities with rich histories can be found around the world. Unfortunately, some cities are set apart not by their beauty or history but the relative safety of tourists in those cities. How can you know if a city is safe to visit? You may want to leave emotion and sentiment aside in favor of more objective data from the likes of international agencies such as UNODC or step into another's shoes and review experience-based data sources such as Numbeo. Numbeo publishes...

Growing world population, global food demand and the lack of extensive factors of production push food and agriculture producers to find a new ways to increase output. According to USDA, private agriculture research and development (R&D) expenditures, increased from $6.9 billions in 2000 to $11 billions in 2010. R&D expenditures for crop seed & biotechnology, crop protection chemicals and farm machinery account for about 85% of total private R&D expenditures in the world. Try...

Brent crude oil prices will average $63.4 per barrel in 2018 and decrease to $62.7 per barrel in 2019, according to the most recent forecast from the US Energy Information Administration's monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook (EIA). This reflects an upward revision of $2.5/barrel to the EIA forecast for 2018 compared to last month's Outlook. The OECD Economic Outlook as of November 2017 was less bullish, pegging the real price of a barrel of Brent oil— i.e. price adjusted for inflation—at...