World Bank Dataviz

How People Use Mobile Phones in Emerging Markets in Asia

Social media apps are the most commonly used mobile apps in emerging countries in Asia, according to a survey conducted by Jana, a Boston-based mobile technology company. For example, 87% of respondents in Indonesia have social media apps on their mobile phones. The second most common mobile apps are games. 

Jana surveyed over 3000 people in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Vietnam to find out how mobile phones are being used. Explore the results in their interactive infographic.

Calculating the World’s Population

How do demographers actually know how many people live on Earth? Can they accurately calculate the number of people that have ever lived? You asked our data help desk these questions, and our open data whiz drew the answers in this video.

Do you have more questions about how data is calculated? Ask them via our data help desk or on Twitter with hashtag #dataquestion

The world’s fastest and slowest growing metropolitan economies

According to The Economist: “The world’s largest 300 metropolitan economies account for 19% of the global population and almost half the world’s GDP.”

Data from the Brookings Institute. 

Which developing countries received the most remittances in 2012?

According to a new World Bank report, officially recorded remittance flows to developing countries are estimated to reach $406 billion in 2012, a growth of 6.5% over the previous year.

The top recipients of migrant remittances in 2012 are India ($70 billion), China ($66 billion), the Philippines ($24 billion), Mexico ($24 billion), and Nigeria ($21 billion).

These flows are expected to rise 8% in 2013 and 10% in 2014 to reach $534 billion in 2015. The size of remittance flows to developing countries is now more than three times that of official development assistance.

Source: Migration and Development Brief 19

Global Undersea Communications Infrastructure

Greg’s Cable Map is an attempt to consolidate all the available information about the world’s undersea communications infrastructure and provide a map along with raw data. See “The Economic Impacts of Broadband” for more information on how the internet and broadband internet access has an impact on a country’s GDP.

Global water demand

Global water demand: Baseline scenario, 2000 and 2050 

This graph by the OECD shows water needs for irrigation, energy, factories, etc between 2000 & 2050. 

From OECD: ”With water demand projected to increase by 55% by 2050, there will be increased competition for it. By that time, 3.9 billion people – more than 40% of the world’s population - are likely to be living in river basins facing severe water stress.”

Source: The Environmental Outlook Baseline,output from IMAGE suite of models. Retrieved from the OECD on 8/27/2012.

Global Remittance Flows

This visualization shows the global movements of money due to remittances (money sent by migrants to their home country). Data from the World Bank can be downloaded here.

Average world life expectancy in 2009 was 69 years.

In this interactive graph, each line represents a country’s life expectancy over time.  Which country’s life expectancy dips the most in the 1990’s? Click on this image to find out.

“World Life Expectancy” using World Bank Data produced by Nathan Yau, retrieved from Flowing Data on 17/8/2012.

Where does development assistance for health come from?

Development assistance for health by channel of assistance (Global), 1990-2011, interactive treemap retrieved from IHME on 17/8/2012.