Countries of the world ranked by stuff

August 25, 2010

Topic

Statistical Visualization

What country has the best education? Health? Quality of life? Thomas Klepl and Adam Clarkson of Newsweek take a look at important metrics for the world’s best countries. It’s basically a parallel coordinates plot turned on its side. Each represents a metric, and each circle in a row is a country.

Select a country from the list on the left or by directly interacting with the plot. If a country is top in all categories, like Finland, then all of the scores are going to be on the right. Burkina Faso, on the other hand, is all the way to the left. Of course, this is only the “top” 100 countries.

You can also filter by geographic regions, income, and population groups.

While I’m not totally sure about the ranking system and methodology, it’s an interesting look.

[Thanks, Adam]

8 Comments

  • Diane — August 25, 2010 at 4:27 am

    Finland rocks!

  • Jeroen Prinsen — August 25, 2010 at 7:43 am

    clicking on the infographic I noticed that there is a very strong correlation between scores on practically every category and income level and there is almost no correlation for every category and size of the population.

    However, correlation is not causation, so it is very well possible that advancement in each category lead to higher GDP/capita. Or that an increase in GDP/capita will lead to an increase in scores for health, education, etc.

    Thanks for sharing!

  • Colourless Green — August 25, 2010 at 8:57 am

    Um, I think the grammar is a bit off here. I don’t understand some of this.

    “Each show represents a metric”
    It sounds like there was an edit that happened in the middle there.

    ” It’s basically a parallel coordinates plot turn on its side.”
    Turned?

  • Joel — August 25, 2010 at 7:59 pm

    erm, methinks the data is a tad skewed.

    I’ve got two degrees (not common) yet only have 18 years of education yet claims the “average” in Australia is 20.5.

  • Sergey — September 15, 2010 at 1:34 pm

    I agree about data being skewed. The total rank seems a sum of category ranks. However some categories consider several metrics, but health is only one metric. Hard to believe that health system in Russia is much worse than Jamaica.
    The interactivity is decent. Needs a search for a country by name.