Compare country cards
Three of the fifty-four cards in three columns: the identity and its terms, scale, external debt, and the data-quality layer that drives the confidence flag. The bars share one scale across the columns, which is the point of the view. Output per worker falling by two per cent a year in one country and rising by two in the next is a different picture from either card read on its own.
What a blank means here. A cell that says not yet fetched is a series no source has yet supplied for that country, or one that does not exist for it. A cell that says not yet computable is a number derived from one that is missing, which is why an implied growth rate can be blank on a card whose three terms are not all filled. Nothing on the page substitutes a zero for a missing number, and an unfilled term in the bar is drawn hatched and carries no width.
Open the comparison in its own tab, worth doing on a small screen, where the whole viewport goes to the three columns instead of a frame inside a page.
Load the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and South Africa, the trio Chapter 1 sends you here for. Read down the identity block first. All three have a working-age population growing faster than their output per worker, and in two of the three output per worker is shrinking. Then read down the data-quality block. The two largest of the three counted their people in 1984 and in 2006, and the one with the strongest statistical system is the one whose demographic term is the smallest.
- Swap South Africa for Ethiopia and read the same two blocks. Which of the two comparisons would you rather build a continental average on, and what does that tell you about continental averages?
- Put two countries of the same currency zone in the first two columns, say Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, and a third outside it. Which of the rows on this page separate the currency zone from the country outside it, and which do not?
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