Gapminder

Gapminder is a data visualization tool for many country statistics over the last 30 years. The director of Gapminder, Hans Rosling, comes from the health and development field, so many of the statistics are geared towards that, but one statistic of interest to us may be the percentage of population in urban areas.

Gapminder homepage

Gapminder Data Visualization tool - The default view is Income (GDP per capita) vs Life expectancy, and not only can you see a clear correlation between the two, you can also see the migration of countries from sick and poor to healthy and rich.

You may have heard about Hans Rosling from one of the two talks he gave at TED. Very animate presenter with interesting insights and definitely worth checking out. He also creates small Gapcasts, a vlog style presentations covering small topics. I'm embedding the one he did on Urbanization trends:



I played around with Gapminder to get some rough trends and correlations:

Income vs Urban Population, %
Correlations: Richer countries are more urban.
Trends: Countries are becoming richer and more urban over the last 30 years.
Interesting note: Japan (66%) is surprisingly less urban than US (80%) in 2004.
Besides the city nations of Singapore and Hong Kong, Belgium (97%) is the most urban country while Brundi (10%) is the least urban country.

Life Expectancy vs Urban Population, %
Correlations: Healthier countries are more urban.
Trends: Countries are becoming healthier and more urban over the last 30 years.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions vs Urban Population, %
Correlations: Higher the urban population, the more pollution.
Trends: More of both in recent years.

Fertility Rate vs Urban Population, %
Correlations: More urban, the smaller the family.
Trends: Fertility rate is definitely in decline in recent years. We keep hearing that population is exponential, but if we look at it as an S-curve, where will it flatten out? Also, notice the number of countries well below the replacement rate (2), including Japan and many of the European countries.

Surprisingly no noticeable correlation:
Economic Growth, % vs Urban Population, %
Instinctively, I thought urbanized societies were growing at a faster rate, but not necessarily true.

And there are many more comparisons you can make on Gapminder. I'm not sure where all the data for Gapminder comes from, but on the website are links to many different data sources.

All this data play brought up an interesting question for me: Why urbanization?