Global Economy Archive:

There are all kinds of inaccuracies in this, but the major point that we are very very very rich still comes through.

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The Economist has updated their annual Big Mac Index.

…based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of an identical basket of goods and services (in this case, a burger) in any two countries. For example, the average price of a Big Mac in America in January 2014 was $4.62; in China it was only $2.74 at market exchange rates. So the “raw” Big Mac index says that the yuan was undervalued by 41% at that time. Burgernomics was never intended as a precise gauge of currency misalignment, merely a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible.

Interesting footnotes: India’s Maharaja Mac is made out of chicken.

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A spiffy annotated interactive visualization by the NYT on what different industries actually pay in taxes. The differences in rates between industries illustrate who is getting tax breaks. The related article is worth a read.

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Some basic demographic data on the United States and the World. Besides being able to drill down into the numbers several different ways there are a couple of interactive charts – like the population pyramid where you can watch the baby boomer bulge move over the years.

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OK, this isn’t a chart. But it is an incredibly well designed and hilarious rap video about economic theory.  Images and methods are are powerful communication tools. Check out EconStories for more music videos and mini-documentaries.

This year, in interactive format, allowing you to select a base currency and see the changes over time.

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Where most regions are grappling with the strains of an aging population – Africa is having the opposite experience.

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China has been heavily investing in Africa the past few years.

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The New York Times uses resized maps to illustrate some relative economic indicators. Resized non-contiguous cartograms are always interesting (mappingworlds for example), but I’m not sure they shed much light here as the country proportions are very similar across indicators. As usual, however, the NYT includes some very clear narrative notes to help you along.

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A nicely annotated chart demonstrating how Germany’s economic performance compares to the rest of the Euro Area.

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From The Economist:

OUTSIDE China, people tend to assume that the country’s impressive economic growth is due to exports. As the chart below, drawn from our special report on China’s economy, shows, this notion has always been exaggerated and is now plain false. China grows thanks to high levels of investment—far higher than those seen in previous Asian miracles such as South Korea and Japan. The corollary of this is low levels of private consumption. Some argue that this must lead to imbalances that one day will send China’s economy off a cliff. We disagree.

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This has been making the rounds lately. I find it as interesting to look at the minimalist design inherent in modern logos as the ownership concentrations.

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Sometimes you have to strangle software to get what you want. I was looking for a new way to compare world growth across analytical groups. Starting with an excel bubble chart, I noticed that sorting the values by growth rate, and sizing them by GDP value, produces a very beautiful visualization of the distribution. Looking closer, however, I noticed that excel literally draws the graph in the sorted order (lowest to highest in this case), resulting in some of the smaller balls being hidden by the larger ones:

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To fix this turned out to be quite complicated, requiring some software hopping. First you have to copy and paste the chart into Powerpoint, then right-click/save-as-picture into an enhanced metafile (.emf), which you can then open in Illustrator where you can bring all the hidden balls to the front. Anyways, the end result is below. I hope the technique is useful to anyone looking to do some post-production excel chart tweaking.

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Two charts examining the size of debt restructuring by countries. The second chart is more useful since it aggregates the restructurings of countries that had several over different years (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, etc).

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The Financial Times has created a giant videographic project in NYC’s Grand Central Station. Check out details about the installation and watch some of the videos (on business and the global economy) at http://ftgraphicworld.ft.com. Has anyone seen it yet in person?

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