Five economic measures across 188 countries. Hovering any country shows all five at once, because the interesting questions usually sit in the relationship between them.
Source: World Bank World Development Indicators, via Our World in Data. GDP figures are in international dollars at purchasing power parity, which adjusts for price differences between countries and is the appropriate basis for comparison. Trade openness is exports plus imports as a share of GDP, so it exceeds 100% where re-exports are large. Values shown at five-year intervals from 1990, with annual data from 2019.
Income is the strongest single predictor of almost every other indicator on this site. Ecological footprint rises with GDP per capita. So does energy consumption, life expectancy, and — up to a point — life satisfaction. Poverty falls with it.
Keeping economic data on the same site as the environmental data makes those relationships checkable rather than assumed. A country’s footprint is not simply a matter of policy or culture; it is substantially a matter of how rich it is. Any analysis that ignores that is describing income while claiming to describe something else.
The harder question, and the one my own research keeps returning to, is whether the relationship can be broken — whether a country can raise incomes without raising resource use proportionally. The evidence for absolute decoupling remains thin, and the datasets here let you look at the cases where it is claimed.
GDP is shown at purchasing power parity. This adjusts for price differences between countries, so a dollar in Morocco and a dollar in Norway represent comparable purchasing power. Market exchange rates would overstate the gap considerably.
Trade openness can exceed 100%. It is exports plus imports as a share of GDP, and where a country re-exports heavily — Singapore, Hong Kong, Luxembourg — the figure runs well above the size of the economy. It measures integration, not surplus.
Inflation uses an inverted scale. Unlike the other metrics, low is good here, so the colours run from red at high inflation to green at low. Deflation, which is also a problem, sits in the lowest band and is not distinguished.
Unemployment is modelled for many countries. Where no labour force survey exists, the ILO produces an estimate. Comparability across countries with very different informal sectors is weaker than the single number suggests.
Total GDP favours large countries. It answers a different question from GDP per capita — where economic weight sits, rather than how well people live.
My own work on the economy-environment relationship:
Data from the World Bank World Development Indicators, via Our World in Data.