Almost
since the beginning of my PhD I started to navigate into large databases, I was
looking for information about countries, things like population, electricity
consumption, GDP, etc. I did this work for a few months and the more I got into
it the more interesting data I found, the UN has tons and tons of things, is overwhelming the amount; also the World Bank and several
international agencies like the International Energy Agency,
or even the CIA.
But slowly,
something more interesting happened; at the same time I was going through all
these statistics I was reading about macroeconomics, biology, thermodynamics
and things started to mix, questions started to arise.
I have been
always keen to countries’ statistical data, I remember as a child spending
hours looking at the almanac, and I was used to see terms like population
density, GDP growth, population growth, etc. Is the classical data governments
and institution use to write their reports and create forecasts, strategies and
policies.
But as I
said, things can get mixed, and different priorities or focus to put the
attention are, I guess, sometimes forgotten or not taken into consideration.
I started
to make correlations out of the “classic” view and benefiting that I was
learning Processing I decided to put into graphics some of my ideas.
Here four I
find interesting, hope you do too.
Electricity
consumption
People are
normally not aware of how many watts-hour of electricity they consume, they
know very well the bill they have to pay, but how relate that to the
consumption of a country, or the average per capita consumption, what does it
mean in a developed or underdeveloped country and their economic growth?
This first
image, in blue you will see the total electricity consumption of each country,
it jumps immediately to the eye India, China and the USA. The first two have a
large total consumption due to the size of population and manufacturing industry,
these two countries are below average in per capita consumption, the upper
orange lines. As you may well know both countries are experiencing very
important economic growth, what would it happen when they reach a first world
country per capita consumption? Then you can think from the USA: they have a
not so large population (compared to China and India) and great per capita
consumption, nevertheless they seek economic growth, they want (like everybody)
more.
If you look
carefully some countries have a green line above the orange one, which is the
percentage of that energy produced by renewable sources. Very notable is
Iceland that is the country with the largest per capita consumption (by far) but
practically 100% comes from renewable resources… remarkable!
GDP versus
HDI and what about GDP growth?
If the goal
of every civilization is to have a good quality of life we should start by
defining what is good quality of life, and depending on the answer questioning
ourselves if there should be a limit or if we should stop at any moment on
pursuing a higher level, if there is such thing.
Until today
almost all countries measure well-being through GDP growth, which is nothing
else than an economic measure “the sum of all value added to raw materials by labour and
capital at each stage of production, during a given year” (Daly and Farley,
2004). The United
Nations has an interesting tool called Human Development Index (HDI), that is
fully dedicated to measure the quality of life through things that, for most of
the people matter more: education, health, life expectancy among other socially
relevant issues like gender inequality or multidimensional poverty.
In the next
image I place an orange horizontal line representing each country, the upper
the line, the higher their GDP per capita, so you can see that Norway is the
highest in this chart (is not the highest in the world). The more the line goes
to the right of the image the more GDP growth that country has, and the more
goes to the left side the higher the HDI. The vertical white line is zero for
both GDP growth and HDI, and the blue lines represent world average for each
measurement. In this way you can see that for example Singapore has a very good
GDP per capita, above average HDI and extraordinary GDP growth, similar to
Australia, Arab Emirates and Switzerland. It is very good to see that countries
like Bhutan and Ethiopia have an extraordinary GDP growth, very needed to
increase their HDI and GDP per capita, both below average (this not always is
the outcome of GDP growth, ask to your confidence
economist about “allocation”).
Just in
short, if you compare HDI and GDP per capita for all countries you will see
that after a certain level of income makes little or no difference for quality
of life, besides showing the great inequalities between rich and poor countries (this image is not made with Processing is a boring excel chart).
Calories
consumption
This image
is similar to the electricity consumption one, in blue the total country
calories consumption (how much food each country needs) and in orange the
calories per capita. I haven’t marked the averages but it is not hard to see
the “weight” of each country and understand if that weight is due to large
population or large per capita consumption (or both), to my surprise Austria is
the country with the highest per capita consumption. I’m thinking to add here
in some way the total population; it will be easier to draw conclusions.
Population
vs. arable land density
People have
more or less an idea of how many people lives in a country and how big that
country is, so you can imagine how “dense” the population may be, examples
like, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bahrain or Bangladesh are dramatic.
But I
believe what is more important is not how many people can fit in one country,
but how many people can that country fed? I found the amount of arable land per
country and I created the “arable land vs. population” density, and cases that
previously would not raise any alarm, suddenly become scary, like Colombia,
Congo, China, Japan or the UK, they have little arable land for their
population size, which makes them dependable of other countries.
One of my
last conclusions and for many naïve questioning is: why if many countries with above
average consumption or life quality and in definitely excellent conditions, keep
on searching for growth? Some of these countries have a very low or even
negative population growth. Obviously I’m not that naïve, I know the answer. I
just found stupid this system that is growth-dependant and allows such inequalities,
not only among countries but also inside their populations, and that the trend,
even if economic growth is achieved, is increasing them.
I would
like to do some interactive graphics next, with Processing I should be capable
of switching between parameters in order to make more interesting correlations,
the only issue is finding time to do it, I’ll let you know.
