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In which countries do members of the public frequently pay bribes?

ONE in four people paid a bribe during the past year, according to the latest Global Corruption Barometer, which is published annually by Transparency International, an anti-corruption campaign group. The report focuses on the bribes paid by ordinary members of the public to at least one of nine different service providers, including customs, education, medical services and the judiciary, rather than the bribes paid to politicians or public officials that are the mainstay of most corruption scandals. The police were the most frequently bribed: 29% of those who came in contact with them paid something. People who run registries or dispense permits were the second-most bribed. Tax authorities received backhanders from 4% of their customers. Generally those who earn less were more likely to have to pay bribes. Among the countries surveyed, this kind of everyday corruption was most prevalent in Liberia. Britain was the cleanest.

Shanghai's school students out-perform all others

SINCE 2000 the OECD has tested school pupils in mainly rich countries every three years on reading, mathematics and science. Its latest report, published on December 7th, gives the results for students in 65 countries or regions, many of which are included for the first time. And it is a newcomer to the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) that has taken top spot in each discipline. High-school children in Shanghai outscored those elsewhere by a substantial margin in reading, the report's focus. Shanghai, Finland, South Korea and Hong Kong also have some of the smallest variations among student scores. Canada and Japan are the best-performing of the G7 nations, and Poland has made significant strides. Britain has slipped down the rankings, despite spending heavily on education in the last decade.

This year is likely to be the warmest ever recorded

MORE fuel was added to the climate-change talks in Cancún this week with the announcement that 2010 is very likely to be the warmest year yet. On December 2nd Britain's Met Office reported that from January to October the world was 0.55°C warmer than the average between 1961 and 1990, the benchmark. At that rate, it forecasts that 2010 will probably end up being the hottest year since records began in 1850, surpassing the previous high recorded in 1998. Data gathered by the two other main research institutes that monitor global temperatures indicate a similar outcome. A ranking of the hottest years shows minor variation in the data gathered by each institute (the other two reckon 2005 was hotter than 1998, for instance). Each of the last ten years features in the top 11 warmest years recorded in all datasets.

I’VE just been sent a link to a YouTube preview (embedded below) of The Joy of Stats, a television programme to be broadcast on December 7th on BBC 4. Presented by Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor of public health, it looks like a romp—implausible only if you’ve never seen the great man in action, either on the internet or, if you’re really lucky, live. I’m really lucky. I’ve seen him in action three times, the first at a one-day conference in Cambridge about five years ago.

Almost everything about the event has now vanished from my memory—when and where exactly it was, who had arranged it, the topic—almost everything, that is, except his talk. I am sure that the audience were mostly professionals in the field of medical statistics, and yet with the help of nothing more than animated bubble charts, the even more animated Swede bouncing around in front of them had the audience eating out of the palms of his hands.

He gave various demonstrations of Gapminder, the software he and others had developed to show multiply varying statistics—life expectancy and wealth by country, say—simultaneously and as animations, so that instead of having to waste an axis in order to show time, the data presentation could run like a high-speed replay.

How the world's cities have fared since the financial crisis hit in 2007

CITIES are the great engines of growth in the world economy. Istanbul, with income growth of 5.5% and employment growth of 7.3% over the past year, is currently the world's best-performing city, according to a new report by the Brookings Institution and the London School of Economics. The report ranks 150 cities from across the globe according to growth in gross value added per person (a proxy for income) and employment. The 150 metropolitan areas represented just 12% of the world's population but accounted for 46% of the world's GDP in 2007. Some cities have plunged in the rankings since the "Great Recession". Dubai and Dublin, the second and sixth best-performing cities respectively between 1993 and 2007, now rank as the most stagnant.

Measured a different way, the correlation between money and happiness is surprisingly strong

DISMAL scientists who look at happiness often contend that, beyond a GDP per capita of just $15,000 (measured at purchasing-power parity), money does not buy happiness. Up to that point the correlation between the two is strong, but thereafter it falls away. If this is true then some heretical conclusions follow: rich America is no happier than poorer Brazil, so what is the point in people who live in rich countries working harder to get ever richer? Politicians should concentrate on maximising the mental health of their voters, rather than the size of their pay cheques. But plot the data another way, on a logarithmic scale where each increment represents a 100% increase in income per head, and the relationship between wealth and happiness looks more robust. 

One of the world's worst plagues is giving ground

ON NOVEMBER 23rd UNAIDS, the UN body charged with combatting the AIDS epidemic, released its latest report. This carries good news. Though some 33m people are infected, the rate of new infections is falling—down from 3.1m a year a decade ago to 2.6m in 2009. Moreover, as the map shows, the figure is falling fastest in many of the most heavily infected countries. The reason is a combination of behavioural change (people are losing their virginity later, are being less promiscuous and are using condoms more), a big reduction in mother-to-child transmission at birth and through breast-feeding, and the roll-out of drug treatment for those already infected. Besides prolonging life, antiretroviral drugs make those taking them less likely to pass the virus on. More than 5m people in poor and middle-income countries are now on these drugs, though another 10m could benefit. (The remainder of those infected are not yet ill enough for the drugs to do do them good.) The problem, as always, is money. UNAIDS reckons the fight needs about $25 billion a year to be fully effective. At the moment, the sum spent is around $17 billion. Not a bad fraction of what is needed, but one that it will be difficult to sustain in the face of the world’s current economic difficulties.

Japan is ageing faster than any country in history

FOR about 50 years after the second world war the combination of Japan’s fast-growing labour force and the rising productivity of its famously industrious workers created a growth miracle. Within two generations the number of people of working age increased by 37m and Japan went from ruins to the world’s second-largest economy. In the next 40 years that process will go into reverse. The working-age population will shrink so quickly that by 2050 it will be smaller than it was in 1950, and four out of ten Japanese will be over 65. Unless Japan’s productivity rises faster than its workforce declines, which seems unlikely, its economy will shrink.

The price of food since 1980

FOOD prices have risen sharply this year according to The Economist's food-price index. A drought in Russia, prompting an export ban on wheat, and an unexpectedly poor corn harvest in America both took their toll. And the price of agricultural commodities could continue on their upward path. The world should prepare for  “harder times ahead”  according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation unless production of food crops increases significantly next year. China's government is even considering price controls on food (and energy) to tame inflation and head-off popular discontent. Yet as our index shows, in real terms food is still cheaper than it was 30 years ago.

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How selected American states compare to various countries

THE human development index (HDI) is an attempt to give a snapshot of a country's success by combining three important indicators: health, education and wealth. The most recent global HDI ranking from the United Nations' Development Programme places Norway top, with the United States fourth (out of 169 countries). But with over 300m people living in 50 states, America varies greatly, so the American Human Development Project releases a state-based version of the HDI. We have put the two indices together to see where America's states would rank if they were countries. Because the indicators used in the two indices were slightly different, we calculated our index from scratch using comparable data (though we used a proxy for educational attainment). Our index still has Norway as number one but America drops to eighth.