Today
Coffee is part of daily life for millions of people around the world. It’s also a key source of income and employment in many countries. In this chart, I want to focus on the shift in where it is grown over the last six decades.
The chart shows the breakdown of global green coffee bean production by region, from 1961 to 2024. Green coffee beans are those that haven’t yet been roasted.
South America has been the largest producing region throughout this period, but its share of global output has fallen, as has Africa’s. The biggest story is the growth of coffee production in Asia: it went from producing less than 5% of the world’s coffee in the early 1960s to about 32% today.
Much of Asia’s growth comes from Vietnam, where production rose from around 5,000 tonnes in the early 1980s to about 2 million tonnes today. It now produces more than all African countries combined.
This expansion was driven largely by the spread of Robusta, a hardier and higher-yielding variety than Arabica, which is the type that dominates Latin American production.
Brazil is the world’s largest producer, while Vietnam is now second. Colombia used to be in that position, but Vietnam overtook it in 1999.
May 23
The International Energy Agency (IEA) just published its latest annual Global EV Outlook. It provides estimates for electric vehicle sales in 2025.
One in four (25%) cars sold in 2025 were electric, more than double the share from just four years earlier.
But there are large differences in adoption rates across the world. This chart shows new sales shares by country. In Norway, almost every new car is an electric one. In China, more than half are, while in the United States, it’s just 10%.
These figures include fully electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. You can find this data broken down by vehicle type in this chart.
May 21
To decarbonize road transport, the world must move away from petrol and diesel cars towards electric vehicles and other forms of low-carbon transport.
This transition has already started. In fact, global sales of combustion engine cars are well past their peak and are now falling.
As you can see in the chart, global sales peaked in 2017. This is calculated based on data from the International Energy Agency. Bloomberg New Energy Finance also estimated this peak occurred around that time.
Sales of electric cars, on the other hand, are growing quickly. They more than doubled in the three years from 2022 to 2025.
May 19
In Tajikistan, remittances — the money sent or brought back by migrants — amounted to 48% of GDP in 2024. The chart places this figure in context by comparing it with other countries with data for the same year.
Nicaragua and Honduras receive remittances worth around a quarter of their GDP — high by global standards, but still far below Tajikistan's level.
Remittances here include two types of flows: money migrants abroad send home to their families, and money cross-border workers bring home from short-term jobs abroad.
Both of these flows play a role in Tajikistan, where most remittances come from labor migrants in Russia. In addition to the roughly 400,000 Tajiks settled there, hundreds of thousands more cross the border for seasonal and short-term work.
According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, about 1.2 million Tajiks were in Russia in mid-2024, which is more than a tenth of Tajikistan's total population.
The World Bank's latest Tajikistan Economic Update says that much of the country's recent rapid economic growth (above 8% since 2021) was supported by these remittance inflows.
May 16
We’ll often see headlines quoting how many gigawatts of new solar farms or coal plants China is building. But it’s hard to get a meaningful sense of scale for how electricity generation in China is changing.
The chart puts it in perspective.
In 2025 alone, China’s electricity generation increased by almost 500 terawatt-hours (TWh). This is compared here to the total amount of electricity that whole countries generate each year.
Germany generates almost exactly that amount. That means China effectively added a Germany-sized grid to its electricity system in just one year.
What’s also quite staggering is that almost all of this new generation came from solar and wind. China generated 340 TWh more electricity from solar than the year before.
That’s more than our two home countries, the UK and Spain, generate from all sources each year.
Low-carbon sources grew so much that coal power in China actually fell slightly.
May 14
Japan closed down most of its nuclear plants after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011, and nuclear production dropped dramatically.
You can see this in the chart above, which shows Japan's electricity mix since 1985. It’s based on data from the Energy Institute.
Fossil fuel plants — notably coal and gas — were ramped up to keep the lights on. The first nuclear reactors only came back online in 2015, under stricter rules from a new safety regulator created after the disaster.
As of early 2026, 15 reactors are running — out of 54 before Fukushima — and nuclear's share of electricity is still only around a third of its pre-2011 level.
May 12
Crop yields across Africa have lagged far behind the rest of the world — the regional average is around 2.5 times lower than the global average.
But some countries in the region show that yields can grow much faster. Ghana is one example. In the chart, you can see its cereal yields compared to the average for Africa as a whole.
Several government programs contributed to this growth.
In 2008, the Ghanaian government launched a fertilizer subsidy program; it had some impact on yields but was relatively modest.
The largest shift came from the introduction of the Planting for Food and Jobs program in 2017, which dedicated large public funds to distributing improved seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs to farmers.
The data shown is based on nationally reported statistics, and some researchers question the exact size of the reported gains.
But the result that yields have gone up looks robust: independent modeled assessments estimate that maize and rice production are over 40% higher than they would have been without the program.
