Jan 7th 2011, 10:25 by P.K.
AN article in this week's print edition discusses the difficulties faced by London Mayor Boris Johnson's fledgling cycle-hire scheme since its launch in July 2010.
The latest in a growing list of cities adopting such schemes, bicycles are available for hire from over 300 designated docking stations (ie high-tech bike racks) across London's city centre.
University College London's Centre for Advanced Spacial Analysis (CASA) have produced an interactive graphic (accessible by clicking the image above) that uses data collected by many of the cities with bike-hire schemes to show usage patterns in real time.
Users can see the number of bikes in use at any one time, while coloured circles mark the size and location of parking bays. There are charts, too, detailing which docks are empty or full and which areas are seeing the most use. An especially interesting feature is an animation, which shows a time-lapse view of activity over the previous 48 hours.
Jan 6th 2011, 14:10 by The Economist online
Africa is now one of the world’s fastest-growing regions
MUCH has been written about the rise of the BRICs and Asia’s impressive economic performance. But an analysis by The Economist finds that over the ten years to 2010, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa. On IMF forecasts Africa will grab seven of the top ten places over the next five years (our ranking excludes countries with a population of less than 10m as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, which could both rebound strongly in the years ahead). Over the past decade the simple unweighted average of countries’ growth rates was virtually identical in Africa and Asia. Over the next five years Africa is likely to take the lead. In other words, the average African economy will outpace its Asian counterpart.
Jan 5th 2011, 16:28 by The Economist online
Incidents of mass wildlife mortality are quite common
THREE thousand blackbirds fell from the sky in the American state of Arkansas on New Year’s Eve. The cause has not yet been determined but preliminary laboratory tests revealed acute physical trauma. Fireworks may have been to blame. While the incident was alarming, it is not unprecedented, according to America’s National Wildlife Health Centre which monitors wildlife mortality events across America. One of the biggest such events occurred in 1986, when 30,000 Ohioan blackbirds and starlings were poisoned over a period of eight days. Our chart shows the incidents that caused the most wildlife fatalities in 2010.
Jan 4th 2011, 12:48 by The Economist online
Countries with the fastest and slowest growth forecasts
THE cost of insuring Ireland’s debt against default is now higher than insuring Argentina’s. Five-year Argentinean credit-default swaps (CDS) have been tightening, whilst Ireland’s have widened to 609 basis points, the third highest in the world, after Greece and Venezuela. GDP growth forecasts for 2011 are not much more optimistic for these European countries. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, Ireland’s and Greece’s GDP will decline by 0.9% and 3.6% respectively. The PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), find themselves among the slowest growers this year. In contrast, after avoiding recession in 2008 and 2009, and enjoying the global recovery in 2010, Qatar is set to grow by 15.8% this year. Strong growth is largely due to its liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects and an expansionary fiscal policy focused on infrastructure. China and India are also projected another year of strong growth, 8.9% and 8.6%, respectively.
Jan 4th 2011, 10:16 by The Economist online
Online advertising spending is growing fast
GLOBAL spending on advertising will grow by 4.5% in 2011, double the rate of the previous year, according to ZenithOptimedia, an ad agency. This will be led by online advertising which will increase by 16%. Television advertising will also grow, led by emerging markets, where it is an especially dominant medium. But spending on print advertising will fall by around 1%. Extending print-media brands online offers some hope of reversing the downturn, but digital ad revenue will not replace that lost by print in the foreseeable future, according to the World Association of Newspapers.
Dec 30th 2010, 15:22 by The Economist online
A snapshot of our most popular charts from 2010
WHAT makes a popular chart? The theme running through the 20 most viewed daily charts published on this website in 2010 is hard to discern, with charts detailing everything from iPad prices to beer consumption. The most popular, by a distance, showed the ratio of the salary of a country’s leader to its GDP per person. (On this measure, India’s prime minister is especially poorly rewarded.) The particular appeal of that chart is not entirely clear, though we were rather pleased with the headline. A tree map, a style of chart used on this blog for the first time, indicates the relative popularity of the top 20 charts. Such maps are handy for showing a large number of data values that would visually overcomplicate a pie chart. Colouring can be used to group subsets within the data or, as in this case, to create a heat map. Click on a box to see the corresponding chart.
Dec 29th 2010, 14:40 by The Economist
THE global property bust that pulled the world into recession in 2008 began to lift in 2010. House prices turned up in Britain and stabilised in America (chart 1) but slid further in Spain. The process of deleveraging kept rich-world inflation subdued (chart 2).
Robust demand and loose monetary policy let it accelerate in India and China. By late 2010 output and employment had turned up in most rich countries but not enough to regain pre-crisis levels (chart 3).
Bowing to American pressure, China allowed the yuan to rise slightly (chart 4); higher inflation meant that in real terms it rose considerably more. Japan watched in alarm as a rising yen (chart 5) threatened its export-led recovery. Europe trembled as its sovereign-debt crisis undermined the euro.
Rich-world budgets remained deeply in deficit but at least those gaps generally shrank, most of all in countries, like Greece, undergoing austerity (chart 6).
Sadly, austerity did not provide the hoped-for relief: peripheral European government-bond yields continued to rise relative to Germany’s (chart 7).
Bonds’ best days may be over everywhere. In emerging markets and America bond prices increased through most of 2010 (chart 8) then fell as America’s economy sprang to life and investors flocked to equities.
Commodities trounced both stocks and bonds (chart 9). Bulls attribute this to global growth, especially in the emerging world; bears cite a desire for inflation hedges. The tension between them will drive markets in 2011.
Dec 29th 2010, 12:37 by T.S.
THIS week's print edition includes an article about the 2010 United States census, some of the results of which were released on December 21st. The official website includes an interactive graphic (accessible by clicking the thumbnail image to the right) showing how population levels, population density and the resulting apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives have changed over the past 100 years. Redistricting data, including state, county and local counts, will be released starting in February 2011.
Dec 28th 2010, 14:11 by The Economist online
Sovereign-debt struggles in Europe
TEN years ago when the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, calculated scores for countries' sovereign-debt risk, the riskiest countries by some distance were Russia, Brazil and China, three of the four emerging-market BRICs (along with India). The scores measure the risk of a build-up in government debt, and take political, economic-policy, economic-structure and liquidity-risk factors into account. Now, though, some European economies look flakier. High public debt, weak growth and high unemployment explain why credit-rating agencies recently put Greece and Spain on credit watch, and downgraded Portugal's and Ireland's ratings. European governments that have sought to bring huge deficits under control have encountered public demonstrations and disorder. Concerns over contagion have caused sovereign credit-default swap spreads to widen, and the cost of borrowing to rise. Ten-year Greek bond yields are now over 12%, more than double what they were at the beginning of the year. Greece, which according to its prime minister, went "through hell in 2010", will be hoping 2011 is a bit easier.
Dec 27th 2010, 9:20 by The Economist online
More vehicles will be sold in China than anywhere else in 2011
THE world’s auto industry is expected to suffer a fourth year of poor sales in 2011. Demand in America will rise only slightly: with the housing market still in the doldrums and cash-for-clunker subsidies at an end, consumers will be wary about buying big-ticket items. In Europe, without subsidies and with government spending cuts due to come into force, demand will fall further. Sales in Japan will dip again. And although sales will rise in China, the pace will slow. Demand for cars will grow in other developing countries such as India, but their volumes will not be enough to make up the shortfall.
Dec 18th 2010, 16:09 by A.L.B., T.N. and R.J.
FIDESZ, a right-wing party, was elected to government in Hungary in April with a stonking majority and a large popular mandate for change following what it saw as eight years of misrule and corruption under the Socialist Party. In office, Fidesz, led by the belligerent prime minister, Viktor Orban, has interpreted this mandate in a liberal fashion, extending state control over independent institutions and appointing party men to roles of authority. With Hungary about to take up the rotating presidency of the European Union, some observers are concerned about what they consider to be a growing trend of assaults on the country's independent centres of power. Our interactive chart chronicles the events of the last eight months.
Dec 16th 2010, 13:11 by The Economist online
The ratio of youth to adult unemployment worsens
THE global recession has hit young workers particularly hard. In the mostly rich countries of the OECD, the youth-unemployment rate (the unemployed as a proportion of the labour force aged 15-24) increased by 4.9 percentage points between 2007 and 2009, to 18.4%. By the second quarter of 2010 it had risen to 19.6%. Young people typically struggle to gain employment and are the first to be laid off; in nine countries more than one in four are now jobless. Spain has the highest youth-unemployment rate, at 42%, more than twice the unemployment rate of adults aged 25-54. In New Zealand, Sweden and Luxembourg, the youth-to-adult unemployment ratio is more than four. Germany has the lowest ratio (1.3), largely thanks to its successful apprenticeship system. The OECD warns that recovery will be slow and forecasts that youth unemployment will still be around 20% by the end of 2011.
Dec 16th 2010, 12:31 by P.W. and D.H.
We invite you to predict when China will overtake America
CHINA jumped ahead of Japan in 2010 to become the world’s second-biggest economy, but when will it grab the number-one slot? The Economist’s interactive chart allows you to make your own predictions. The relative paths of GDP in dollar terms in China and America depend not only on real growth rates but also on inflation and the yuan’s exchange rate against the dollar. Over the past decade real GDP growth averaged 10.5% a year in China and 1.7% in America; inflation averaged 3.8% and 2.2% respectively. Since Beijing scrapped its dollar peg in 2005, the yuan has risen by an annual average of 4.2%. Our best guess for the next decade is that annual real GDP growth averages 7.75% in China and 2.5% in America, inflation rates average 4% and 1.5%, and the yuan appreciates by 3% a year. Plug in these numbers and China will overtake America in 2019. But if China’s real growth rate slows to an annual average of only 5%, then (leaving the other assumptions unchanged) China would become number one in 2022. Please place your own bets.
Dec 15th 2010, 15:02 by T.S. and G.D.
PAUL BUTLER, an intern at Facebook, has created a striking map that shows the volume of friendships between particular parts of the world. As he explains on the company's website:
I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.
After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.
The map is indeed surprisingly detailed, at least in the parts of the world where Facebook is widely used. A detail showing South Asia is shown above; Indonesia, which recently overtook Britain to become Facebook's second-largest market, is prominently illuminated. The parts of the world where there are few people remain in darkness, as do countries where Facebook is not the dominant social network (Brazil) or is blocked (China). For a full explanation of how the map was created, check out Mr Butler's note. His map is, of course, reminiscent of the NASA image from 2000 showing the Earth at night, in which populated areas are brightly lit. But it was derived in a completely different way.
Dec 15th 2010, 14:01 by The Economist online
The cost of sending money home
SOME 192m migrants—3% of the world population—sent remittances totalling $316 billion to developing countries last year, according to the World Bank. In the third quarter of this year, the cost was nearly 9% of a remittance of $200. Fees and exchange-rate margins make up the service-providers' charges. Banks are the most expensive, charging an average of 13% of the total amount. Post offices and money-transfer operators charge 9% and 7%, respectively. The cost of sending remittances is negatively correlated with the number of migrants and service-providers in a country; the more competition, the lower the cost. Our chart shows, for each country, which is the most expensive country to send $200 to. In Brazil, for example, it is most costly for resident Bolivians to send money home, costing almost three times as much as it does for Peruvians (not shown). In France, the most expensive remittance destination is Vietnam, followed closely by China.
Dec 14th 2010, 16:59 by The Economist online
Progress is being made in tackling malaria
THE World Health Organisation’s annual report on malaria was published on December 14th. As with the report on AIDS, the picture is one of cautious optimism. Malaria is still a huge killer. Nearly 800,000 people, most of them children, succumb each year. But what was, only a decade ago, a desultory campaign against the disease now looks like a determined assault. New drugs, based on a plant extract called artemisinin, have been one arm of this assault. The other, as the chart shows, has been the spread of insecticide-drenched bednets, which protect sleepers from the mosquitoes that carry malarial parasites. The result has been a reduction in new cases of more than 50% in 11 countries in Africa, the worst affected continent, over the past ten years. Elsewhere, similar falls have been seen in 32 of the 56 countries where malaria is endemic. Overall, the number of annual worldwide deaths is estimated as 781,000 (admittedly with a margin of error of more than 150,000), down from 985,000 in 2000.
Watch "Malaria's frontline", our audio slideshow on efforts to detect and treat the disease on Thailand's border with Myanmar.
Dec 13th 2010, 13:12 by The Economist online
Africa's cities are set to swell in size
OVER a third of Africa's 1 billion inhabitants currently live in urban areas, but by 2030 that proportion will have risen to a half. According to a recent report from UN-HABITAT, the United Nations agency for human settlements, the population of some cities is set to swell by up to 85% in the next 15 years. The most populous city in 2010, Cairo, will grow by 23% to 13.5m people. By 2025, however, it will have been overtaken by both Lagos (15.8m) and Kinshasa (15m). Food and water shortages, poor infrastructure and a lack of housing are among the problems faced by governments during such rapid urbanisation. Progress in meeting these challenges would be shown by a fall in the proportion of slum-dwellers, who currently account for 70% of urban inhabitants.
Correction to this article: Luanda was mistakenly placed among the two biggest cities in Africa; we meant Kinshasa. Sorry. This was corrected on December 13th.
Dec 10th 2010, 13:48 by T.S.
THIS week's edition of The Economist includes Technology Quarterly, which in turn contains a profile of Hans Rosling. He explains how the innovative use of infographics in public health (the topic of many of his presentations) dates back to Florence Nightingale. She developed a new type of pie chart to show that more soldiers were dying from preventable illnesses than from their wounds during the Crimean war. If you are not familiar with this Swedish impresario of data visualisation, or even if you are, a post on our Babbage blog presents some of his most striking presentations (yes, including the one with the sword-swallowing).
Redrawing Britain using phone calls
Dec 10th 2010, 13:25 by G.D.
THIS week we published an article about research, done by the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which analysed landline telephone conversations in Great Britain to find out whether the existing internal regional boundaries agreed with the way people interact by phone. MIT has produced some great visualisations of the data which we were unable to use in the print edition. The map below, for example, shows the strongest 80% of links, as measured by total talk time, between areas within Britain. The opacity of each link is proportional to the total call time between two areas and the different colours represent regions identified using "network modularity optimisation analysis" (in other words, regions whose inhabitants talk to each other a lot). One result is that Scotland looks self-contained in a way that Wales does not. Will this become a tool for independence campaigners?
There's also a video that explains how the research was done:
Dec 10th 2010, 13:10 by The Economist online
Cheerier growth forecast for 2011
ANALYSTS are a bit more optimistic about the outlook for growth in 2011, according to our December poll of forecasters. In all of the countries polled growth forecast for 2011 are either flat or slightly higher compared with our poll in November. Notably, Sweden’s GDP is expected to grow by 3.1% and America 2.6%, up from last month’s poll's 2.8% and 2.3% respectively. The average forecast for GDP growth this year in Canada, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland however, are lower than last month’s. Canada and Italy are also now forecast to have slightly deeper current-account deficits. Our forecast poll also includes consumer prices. For more economic indicators see here.
Dec 9th 2010, 13:03 by The Economist online
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.
Dec 8th 2010, 15:05 by The Economist online
The most expensive books
ON TUESDAY December 7th a complete volume of John James Audubon's "The Birds of America" fetched a record price at auction. The book, which stands more than three feet by two feet (91cm x 61cm) and includes 435 hand-coloured illustrations of birds from North America in life-size, reached $10.3m. The previous record for a book was another copy of Audubon's masterpiece, sold in 2000, which reached $10.2m in today's prices. Indeed, a list of the ten most-expensive books would include five copies of "The Birds of America". Our chart, therefore, strips out any repeat mentions of individual titles. Many of the most expensive books are works of non-fiction, such as Redouté's illustrations of flowers, Gutenberg's Bible and the Declaration of Independence.
Correction: We erroneously attributed George Washington as the author of the "The Federalist". The book was written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. It was George Washington's copy. Sorry. This was corrected on December 10th 2010.
Dec 7th 2010, 14:16 by The Economist online
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.
Dec 6th 2010, 13:46 by The Economist online
An interactive graphic showing the range of a selection of China's missiles
MISSILES have been a pillar of China’s military modernisation. After awesome demonstrations of American firepower, in Operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf war, and then in 1996, when the United States sailed two carrier strike groups close to Taiwan to deter Chinese aggression, China felt that it could no longer depend on sheer manpower for its defence. So it has invested heavily in the strength and technical sophistication of its missiles. The Pentagon has described China’s programme as “the most active land-based ballistic- and cruise-missile programme in the world”. Missiles are good value. Compared with a fully equipped aircraft-carrier, which might cost $15 billion-20 billion, a missile costs about $1m. And missiles can be potent. The chart shows how, in terms of numbers, China has concentrated on short- and medium-range missiles. This puts Taiwan within easy range of a devastating cruise- and ballistic-missile attack. Military analysts fear that the Second Artillery could retarget the missiles, putting Japan at risk, as well as America’s Asian bases. China also has a few intercontinental ballistic missiles, able to carry a nuclear payload. And American strategists are closely watching an experimental anti-ship ballistic missile with a manoeuvrable warhead, which could make it hard for American fleets to approach the Chinese shore. China recently hinted that it may be ready to cut the number of missiles targeting Taiwan. Whether this comes to anything will depend upon relations with the island—and they can be highly unpredictable.
Dec 3rd 2010, 15:35 by The Economist online
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.
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