Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality: The world faces many great and terrifying problems. It is these large problems that our work at Our World in Data focuses on. Thanks to the work of thousands of researchers around the world who dedicate their lives to it, we often have a good understanding of how it is possible to make progress against the large problems we are facing. The world has the resources to do much better and reduce the suffering in the world. We believe that a key reason why we fail to achieve the progress we are capable of is that we do not make enough use of this existing research and data: the important knowledge is often stored in inaccessible databases, locked away behind paywalls and buried under jargon in academic papers. The goal of our work is to make the knowledge on the big problems accessible and understandable. As we say on our homepage, Our World in Data is about Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.

Industry

Research Services

Company size

11-50 employees

Type

Nonprofit

Founded

2012

Specialties

data visualization, open source, and research

• 70,538 followers

  14h

  Meat preferences vary a lot across different countries. America’s most popular type of meat is chicken. In Argentina, it’s beef. And in Japan, it’s seafood. There are large differences in the popularity of meat types across the world. In the chart, you can see the share of supply that comes from different types of meat: poultry, beef, pork, sheep and goat, and fish and seafood. We’ve picked just a selection of countries that highlight some of the variation across the world. Of course, countries also eat very different amounts of meat; this chart focuses on the relative quantities in national diets. This data comes from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (This Data Insight was written by Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Arriagada.)

• 70,538 followers

  1d

  How does the World Bank classify countries by income? Researchers and policymakers often need to compare countries by income, which means having clear criteria for who counts as "rich" or "poor". One widely used approach is the World Bank’s (WB) income classification system, which places countries into four groups — low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high income — based on their gross national income per capita in the previous year. These income groups are used across many international datasets, such as the WB’s World Development Indicators — which include information on topics from access to energy and education to global trade — and are often cited in research and the media. Our colleague Pablo Arriagada recently updated our charts with the latest WB classification, published in July this year based on incomes in 2025. You can see this in the map. The WB publishes updates every July, so we'll refresh our charts again in 2027. Read more about how the World Bank classifies countries by income: https://lnkd.in/eMFvZhMD

• 70,538 followers

  1d

  📝 New article on Our World in Data: The rise of electoral democracy. Most people around the world think democracy is a good way to run a country, but they are often dissatisfied with how it is working in practice and are concerned about where it is heading. But if we step back and look at the longer history of democracy, as we do in this article, we see a broader trend of remarkable progress. The world used to be deeply undemocratic, and despite setbacks, it remains much more democratic than it was only half a century ago. That progress was never steady or secure. The rights and institutions that many of us now live under were the outcome of partial victories and outright setbacks. That is the focus of our article. We look at how the building blocks of electoral democracy developed over the last two hundred years: how elections spread, voting rights expanded, and meaningful political competition developed. Democratic rights are never guaranteed. But politics can change for the better, sometimes even beyond what people at the time could imagine.

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  3d

  Thailand’s population may have already peaked. Many countries are in a fairly unique demographic position in history: their populations are shrinking not due to a temporary shock but to sustained structural decline. If we look at the United Nations’ population estimates and medium projections, 66 countries and territories had already passed peak population this year. Almost all of them are in Europe and East Asia. But there is one country in Southeast Asia in this position: Thailand. As you can see in the chart, the UN projects that its population will continue to fall throughout this century. This is the result of a rapid drop in fertility rates. In 1970, women in Thailand had an average of 6 children; twenty years later, that had fallen to 2. This was as fast as China’s decline. Today, the rate is at most 1.2 children per woman, and some national statistics put it closer to 1. What makes Thailand unusual is that this happened while it was still a relatively poor country. In 1970, it launched its National Family Planning Program. This was voluntary and non-coercive, but effectively increased contraceptive use, family planning access, and education levels for women. (This Data Insight was written by Hannah Ritchie, Edouard Mathieu, and Lucas Rodés-Guirao.)

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  4d

  The latest OWID Brief newsletter is out on Substack! It delivers all our recent work plus curated highlights from across Our World in Data, right to your inbox twice a month. This edition: Peak population, child labor, drivers of deforestation, air conditioning, and more. In each edition we also highlight recent Data Insights, our bite-sized nuggets on the world and how it’s changing. One of today's: Road deaths in the United States have fallen much more slowly than in other rich countries. Read and subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/ejCsSNPa

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  5d

  Four developed countries met the UN’s target for foreign aid in 2025. In the 1970s, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution asking developed countries to contribute at least 0.7% of their national income to foreign aid. Most countries signed off on this goal, except for Switzerland and the United States. But very few countries have met this target in the fifty years since then. Even today, only a handful of countries do. In 2023, five countries met this target: Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark. Two years on, this has dropped to four, as Germany’s contribution shrank to 0.6%. As you can see in the chart, other developed countries give less than 0.7% of their national income. (This Data Insight was written by Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Arriagada.)

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  6d

  What is the best way to reduce our diet’s carbon footprint? Many argue that comparisons based on global averages overlook the large variation in the footprints of foods across the world. If we source our beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced. This data is from the largest meta-analysis of global food systems to date, published in Science by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018). In this study, the authors looked at data across more than 38,000 commercial farms in 119 countries. Plant-based protein sources — tofu, beans, peas and nuts — have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy. The pea producers with the highest footprint emit just 0.8 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents (kgCO2eq) per 100 grams of protein. For nuts it is 2.4 and for tofu, 3.5. All are several times less than the lowest impact lamb (12) and beef (9). Emissions are also lower than those from the best cheese and pork (4.5); and slightly lower or comparable to those from the lowest-footprint chicken (2.4). If you want a lower-carbon diet, eating less meat is nearly always better than eating the most sustainable meat.

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  1w

  Guyana’s oil-driven economy has seen the world’s fastest growth in GDP per capita in recent years. Guyana, a small country in South America, has seen the fastest growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world over the past decade. This is illustrated in the chart, which shows GDP per capita for Guyana and several other countries, based on estimates from the World Bank. The data is adjusted for inflation, so Guyana’s sharp growth is not due to price changes over time. A large and sudden expansion in oil production has driven most of this growth. Between 2020 and 2025, the country’s oil production grew 860%, making it a key contributor to global crude oil supply growth. Before oil extraction started, Guyana’s GDP per capita was well below the global average. It is now more than three times higher. It’s too early to see the full effects of this, and hard to measure how far the oil boom has translated into better living standards in the country. Official poverty estimates, for example, have not been published since production began. But there is early evidence of the government channeling oil revenue toward citizens, for instance, through cash grants for every adult, free tuition at public universities, and increasing health spending. (This Data Insight was written by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Pablo Arriagada.)

• 70,538 followers

  1w

  📝 New article — Which countries have already passed peak population, and when will the rest do so? Many countries around the world are in a unique position: rather than having a constant or growing population, their populations are starting to shrink. This is not a temporary decline, but a structural one caused by falling birth rates. If we look at the United Nations’ population estimates and medium projections, 64 countries and territories had already passed peak population in 2026. Most of them are in Europe and East Asia. In the coming decades, many more countries are expected to join them. By the 2050s, much of South America is projected to have passed the peak. By the 2060s, much of South Asia may do so. This includes the world’s most populous country today: India. But all of these projections are sensitive to the UN’s assumptions about future demographic changes: fertility rates, life expectancy, and migration rates over many decades. If things turn out differently, this peak could come much earlier or later, depending on the country. Take the example of migration. Many more high-income countries would already have shrinking populations without migration. The UN projects that the United States will not reach peak population, even by the end of the century. But if we were to assume zero migration in the US, its population would peak soon and would shrink by 60 million by 2100.

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  1w

  The number of whales killed globally peaked in the 1960s— Global whale populations fell dramatically over the 20th century due to human hunting. Some whale species were pushed to the brink of extinction. But a combination of conservation efforts, technological change, economic incentives, and international policies has reduced global whaling to much lower levels. In the mid-1980s, a global moratorium was agreed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), making commercial whaling illegal. You can see this decline in the chart, which shows the number of whales killed per decade. The chart combines data from two sources: before the 1990s it comes from the paper “Emptying the Oceans” by Robert C. Rocha, Jr. and colleagues; since then, it comes from the IWC. While whaling activity is much lower, it hasn’t been eliminated completely. There are exceptions to the IWC’s moratorium, and Japan withdrew from the IWC completely in 2019. Our colleague Tuna Acisu recently updated our charts with the IWC’s latest annual release, which includes the numbers of whales caught and killed up to 2024. Explore the updated data in our interactive charts: https://lnkd.in/evQBdD5d