As the Eurozone crisis develops, the BBC News has a look at what country owes what to whom:
Europe is struggling to find a way out of the eurozone crisis amid mounting debts, stalling growth and widespread market jitters. After Greece, Ireland, and Portugal were forced to seek bail-outs, Italy – approaching an unaffordable cost of borrowing – has been the latest focus of concern.
But, with global financial systems so interconnected, this is not just a eurozone problem and the repercussions extend beyond its borders.
Simply click on a country, whose arc length represents how much they owe, and arrows show debt.
[BBC News | Thanks, Eugene]
Brilliant idea, but the graphic doesn’t seem to be working for me?
me neither :(
If you click on the link and go to the BBC page you should be okay.
Actually I think this is a pretty weak representation. It looks pretty enough, but what you need to do is see all this data at once – to be able to compare the situations of each country with each other. Since you only get a country’s details when you click on it, you can only compare 2 countries by clicking, memorizing, and clicking another country. That’s way too much cognitive work. These many to many comparisons are tricky to display, and this type of chart is becoming quite popular – because of its prettiness, I assume – but being able to compare each country with the others is essential. Also slightly misleading – these numbers do very little to explain how much trouble each country is in.
I agree. This would be far more useful if you could, at a glance, see collectively how much each country owes (outbound) and how much each country is owed (inbound). Appologies in advance for the self-promotion, but I really think that a design like this would be much better:
http://connections.tgs.northwestern.edu/flow
I wonder if the BBC saw my chord diagrams of the Euro debt crisis. Also, it feels weird to look at debt without considering China.