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Forty years ago, young people had higher literacy rates in Sub-Saharan Africa than in South Asia. You can see on the chart that the region had a 10-percentage-point lead in 1985.

But things have changed a lot since then. Sub-Saharan Africa now lags by more than 14 percentage points.

While literacy has improved in both regions, it has done so much faster in South Asia. There, almost all young people have basic reading and writing skills. In Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them do, but there is still a significant lag behind other world regions.

In South Asia, the increase in literacy rates among young women has been particularly dramatic. In the mid-1980s, only around 40% had basic reading skills. That has more than doubled to over 90%, and the gap between young men and women has essentially closed.

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When I first visited Buenos Aires some years ago, I was struck by how grand the city's historic architecture was. This is something that strikes many tourists: parts of the city feel closer to Paris than you’d expect from a country whose income level today is more similar to my home country of Colombia than to France.

This chart helps put that observation in perspective. It shows the ten richest countries in the world in 1910, according to GDP per capita estimates from economic historians.

By this measure, Argentina was among the world’s richest countries in 1910, ahead of several Western European countries, including Germany and France. It also stood clearly ahead of its peers in Latin America at the time.

But over the course of the 20th century, Western European economies grew far faster, especially after the Second World War, and Argentina fell behind.

A long-run perspective like this shows how much of a difference economic growth can make within just a few generations.

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In 1965, the median age in the United Kingdom was almost twice that of China. Half of the people in the UK were younger than 34 years, and half were older. In China, this midpoint was just 18 years.

Within just a few generations, that age gap has closed.

As you can see in the chart, the median age in both countries is now 40 years. Both populations have aged, but the increase was far faster in China.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, China’s median age fell partly because of a fall in child mortality: birth rates remained high, and more children survived.

After that, the rapid increase is largely explained by a steep fall in fertility, and therefore in births. Before then, high birth rates meant that large cohorts of children were continually entering the population, keeping it young. When births fell, fewer children were added each year, and the large, earlier generations grew older.

China’s median age is expected to continue rising quickly: under the UN’s medium projections, it will be 10 years older than the UK's by 2050.

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Throughout the entire 20th century, about 100 million people died earlier than they would have because of smoking. That’s a lot, but it pales in comparison to the expected numbers for this century.

Between 2000 and 2023 alone, smoking-related deaths are estimated at 163 million. You can see this comparison in the chart.

Some epidemiologists project that unless there is a substantial change in smoking uptake and rates across the world, there could be as many as one billion smoking-related deaths in the 21st century.

In the 20th century, most of these occurred in today’s high-income countries. In the 21st century, most will come from low- and middle-income countries.

Many of the people who are expected to die are smoking today, but even more are expected to be future smokers. Finding ways to help people stop smoking and prevent them from starting matters for keeping this huge figure in the millions, not billions.

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At the turn of the millennium, 2.2 billion people in the world lived in extreme poverty. In international statistics, this means they survived on less than $3 per day (in today’s money).

In the two decades that followed, this number more than halved. You can see this decline in the chart.

This huge reduction was driven by rising incomes and poverty alleviation across East and South Asia. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the opposite happened: while the share living in extreme poverty declined, the total number increased.

Looking ahead, based on the latest available projections from researchers at the World Bank, this reduction in global extreme poverty is expected to end. In fact, numbers in 2040 might be higher than they are today.

This is because most of the extremely poor today live in countries with stagnant economies. If these do not see much stronger economic growth, the world will have nearly one billion living in dire poverty for decades to come.

Note that these projections are based on the latest growth projections from the World Bank and the IMF. From 2031 onward, poverty projections are based on the average growth rates observed from 2015 to 2024.

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Just a decade ago, almost three times as much electricity in the European Union was coming from fossil fuels as from solar and wind.

But last year, for the first time, solar and wind produced more than coal, gas, and oil combined. They accounted for just over 30% of total electricity production.

You can see this rise of solar and wind — and fossil fuels’ decline — in the chart.

This record happened despite a poor year for wind output due to low wind speeds and a slight increase in gas to compensate for lower hydropower output from dry conditions.

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Marriage is closely linked to decisions about having children in many societies. It also matters for legal rights, family finances, and many other aspects of life.

The age at which people marry has rapidly changed in many countries. The chart shows this by tracking the average age at first marriage among women, using records from national statistics.

In Portugal, Italy, and Spain, the average age at first marriage has risen rapidly and consistently. Portugal saw the largest increase: from around 26 years in 2002 to over 32 years by 2020. This is more than six years in less than a generation. It’s also the largest increase among the countries in the OECD Family Database with data available from the early 2000s up to 2020 (the most recent year with available data in the series).

Changes in the timing of marriage have come together with other related shifts. For instance, a growing share of people are not marrying at all.

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4,510 objects were launched into space in 2025, surpassing the previous peak of 2,903 objects in 2023 by a large margin.

The data shows that US agencies and companies were responsible for launching 3,708 of these objects — 82% of the global total.

The vast majority of these American launches consist of small satellites deployed as part of large commercial “constellations”. These interconnected networks of satellites now account for the bulk of all objects sent into orbit.

The rapid growth of satellite constellations makes it possible to expand Internet connectivity, but it also increases concerns regarding space debris and the congestion of Earth’s orbital environment.

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In the 1970s, oil spills from tankers — container ships transporting oil — were common. Between 70 and 100 spills occurred per year. That’s one or two spills every week.

This number has fallen by more than 90% since then. In the last decade, no year has had more than ten oil spills, as shown in the chart.

The quantity of oil spilled from tankers has also fallen dramatically. Over the last decade, the average is less than 10,000 tonnes per year, compared to over 300,000 tonnes in the 1970s.

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In the past, forests around the world were cut down on a massive scale. We lost some of the world’s richest ecosystems.

In recent decades, the picture has become more complex. Deforestation has not ended, but it is no longer happening everywhere. Since 1990, some regions have continued to lose large areas of forest, while others have slowed this long-run trend — and even reversed it.

The map shows regional changes in forest area based on the latest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Deforestation has been particularly large in South America and Africa. At the same time, the forested area has expanded in Europe, North and Central America, and large parts of Asia.

These gains show that deforestation is not inevitable. When pressure on land falls, forests can return.

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The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001. Since then, almost 40 other countries have followed suit.

You can see this in the chart, based on data from Pew Research. By 2025, same-sex marriage was legal in 39 countries.

Last year, two countries were added to the total. Thailand became the first country in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, and a same-sex marriage bill also took effect in Liechtenstein.

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The share of the world population living in extreme poverty has never declined as rapidly as in the past three decades.

The decline in China was particularly fast, and given that one in six people in the world lives there, we’re often asked whether the decline in global poverty was only due to the decline in China.

The chart shows the data that answers this question. In blue, we see the global decline. In red, we see the decline if we exclude China from the data. In the world outside of China, 33% lived in extreme poverty in 1990; by 2025, this share was down to 12%.

The large economic growth that lifted 940 million Chinese people out of extreme poverty since 1990 was a major contributor to the global decline in poverty. But the non-Chinese world also achieved a very large reduction.

It is not true that the global decline in poverty was only due to China. Extreme poverty has declined in China and the rest of the world.

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Forty years ago in Japan, two babies were born for every person who died. Twenty years ago, these numbers were equal. And today, the ratio has reversed: one baby is born for every two people who die.

In the chart, you can see this change in the number of births and deaths over time.

Since deaths now greatly outnumber births, and because immigration is low, Japan’s population has started to shrink.

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Debates over whether religion is booming or dying are common. What does the data say?

Most countries lack long-term data on religious identity, but results from the Pew Research Center offer insights into changes over the decade from 2010 to 2020. (Unfortunately, 2020 is the most recent year for which we have comparable global data.)

At a global level, there was barely any change. The share of people identifying with any religion dropped by just one percentage point, from 77% to 76%.

But religious affiliation did drop significantly across many countries in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. You can see this drop for a selection of countries in the chart.

In Australia, rates dropped from 75% to 58%. In the United States and Chile, the percentage has decreased from roughly 85% to 70%.

So while religious affiliation is stable in many parts of the world, this data shows religion is becoming less prominent in others.

Note that this data is based on self-identification with any religion; it doesn’t tell us about changes in practices or rituals, such as prayer or attending services.

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This chart shows one way to compare automated manufacturing across countries — it plots the number of robots per 1,000 manufacturing employees.

The chart shows very large differences between countries. South Korea stands out, with more than one robot for every ten manufacturing workers.

Singapore comes second, and Germany and Japan rank third. The United States sits in the middle, below Sweden, Denmark, and Slovenia.

This perspective shows industrial robot adoption in relative terms. In another Data Insight, I looked at robot adoption in absolute terms. From that perspective, China stands out by a large margin: it’s a large economy with a huge manufacturing sector, and it has by far the largest stock of industrial robots.

Much of this expansion has happened recently: China’s annual installations increased 12-fold over a decade.

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Most people in the world are religious. When asked whether they identify with any religion, three-quarters of respondents choose one.

But in the chart, you can see huge differences in rates of religious affiliation across the world. In some countries, such as India and Pakistan, it’s almost universal: almost everyone identifies with a religion.

The opposite is true in China, where just one in ten people does. Several countries in East Asia, in particular, have particularly low rates of religious identification compared to other regions.

This doesn’t necessarily mean these populations hold no religious beliefs; they may still engage in activities that can be considered religious or spiritual, even though they don't describe themselves as belonging to any one in particular.

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It might seem odd that countries would agree to import plastic waste from other countries, but many do so for the cheap materials or to feed specific manufacturing processes.

Environmentally, the trade in plastics has often been a concern, as it allows rich countries to effectively “dump” waste on poorer countries with weaker waste management systems.

The good news is that trade in plastic waste has fallen by more than two-thirds over the last decade. You can see this reduction in the chart.

China has been the biggest driver of this. It was once a large importer, but after a steep decline in trade in 2016 and a ban in 2018, many countries lost their largest export market.

In 2024, around 5 million tonnes of plastic waste were traded worldwide. For context, that is around 1% of the total plastic waste generated. What’s perhaps surprising is that most trade is now between high-income countries, which reduces the risk that this waste leaks into the environment.

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Industrial robots are rapidly becoming a common part of manufacturing in some countries. The chart here shows how many new ones are installed each year in the industrialized countries for which we have available data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).

In this dataset, industrial robots are defined as automatically controlled, reprogrammable, and multipurpose machines used in industrial settings. The data covers only physical industrial robots, not software or consumer technologies.

The chart shows that in 2011, China, the United States, Japan, Germany, and South Korea were all installing similar numbers of these robots. However, in the decade that followed, the paths of these countries diverged. By 2023, annual installations in China had risen to 276,000 robots, a twelvefold increase.

Over the same period, installations in the United States, Japan, Germany, and South Korea also increased, but much more slowly: none of them even doubled. The United States, which saw the second-largest rise, went from 21,000 new installations in 2011 to 38,000 in 2023.

These figures refer to new robots installed each year; that is, annual additions to the existing stock of robots. The IFR also publishes data on the total number of robots in operation, and by this measure, China also had the largest installed base, at around 1.76 million robots in 2023.

Relative to its large manufacturing sector, China’s stock of robots today does not stand out – but the data here shows that this is changing quickly.

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Most of our work on war and peace focuses on the people killed directly in the fighting. But war has many other costs: it worsens people’s health, leaves them without work, and pushes them out of their homes.

The chart shows this for the civil war in Syria. Since the war began in 2011, more than 400,000 people have been killed in the fighting. At the same time, annual deaths increased as more people died from other causes. Young children were especially affected: estimates suggest that the number of annual child deaths more than doubled.

The war has also forced millions of people to leave their homes: in total, more than seven million are displaced within Syria, and almost as many are refugees elsewhere.

It also became much harder for people to make a living. Average living standards, measured by GDP per capita, have more than halved since the war began. As a result, poverty and hunger have risen sharply.

These numbers come with uncertainty because conflict makes it hard and dangerous to collect data.

This shows that to understand the costs of war, we need to have a broad perspective and see its impacts on health, displacement, and living standards.

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Three-quarters of people worldwide say they are religious. But rates of religious identity can vary a lot across countries, and so do the particular religions people follow.

In the map, you can see the most common religious affiliation for each country. This can include the “unaffiliated” who do not identify with any specific religion. This data is sourced from the Pew Research Center and is based on how people describe their own identity, regardless of their particular practices or beliefs.

As you can see, Christianity is the most common across much of Europe, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Islam is the most common across North Africa and the Middle East, while Hinduism and Buddhism dominate across much of South Asia.

In East Asian countries such as China, Japan, and South Korea, the religiously unaffiliated are the biggest group. That doesn’t mean these populations hold no religious beliefs; they may still engage in activities that can be considered religious or spiritual, but they don’t describe themselves as belonging to any one in particular.