Soaring debts and plummeting stocks – the financial state of world hasn’t changed a lot in the last years. With debt levels continuing to rise, and economic activity stagnating, the impact appears to lead to yet another financial crisis (isn’t it the same crisis that we are in for three years now?). The following cartogram shows the countries of the world resized to their total public debt in 2011 as estimated by the IMF (data taken from the World Economic Outlook 2011, with additional data from EUROSTAT and other IMF publications). To put the total values into perspective, the countries are coloured by the public debt to GDP ratio (see below for a worldmapper-coloured version of the same map). The small reference map shows the estimated GDP output in 2011, allowing a comparison of global distribution of public debt and the distribution of economic activity:
Category Archives: maps
The World of America’s Debt
The financial crisis continues to make it into the headlines. Mountains of debt piled up by the world’s wealthiest nations (as shown in this map) stir up the financial markets and indicate that political measures since the early days of the economic meltdown in 2008 had little impact or simply were too meaningless to induce a real change into the mechanisms of the markets. The EU keeps struggling to calm investors over fears of yet another country going bust while on the other side of the pond the rating agencies start playing games with the world’s largest economy. As the NYT explains, The rating agency thinks the United States has too much debt, or at least will: “Under our revised base case fiscal scenario — which we consider to be consistent with a AA+ long-term rating and a negative outlook — we now project that net general government debt would rise from an estimated 74 percent of G.D.P. by the end of 2011 to 79 percent in 2015 and 85 percent by 2021.” (read more about credit agency ratings in the A ‘AAA’ Q. and A.). After some brief debates about credit agencies not long ago, these discussions seem to have disappeared again, and the old mechanisms of nervous investors and even more nervous decision makers, like it always did in the last three years.
At the same time an emerging super power starts to find its own political voice against its perhaps largest rival: After years of growing economic dominance, China seems to gain confidence in confronting the USA with bold statements. As the largest holder of US debt, they may start to worry with the investors’ decline in trust in America, causing China to warn America over its addiction to debt.
The current American debt levels did not come out of the blue, but have long started piling up, as a look at the development of US debt over the last decade shows: The total national debt of the United States is at $14.3 trillion this year, up from $5.8 trillion in 2001. Particularly interesting for the global markets is the external debt that the USA owes to foreign holders outside the country. Here George W. Bush took over approximately $1 trillion in foreign debt from the Clinton administration (Bill Clinton managed to induce a reduction in national debt levels in his second term). After a short period in which this downward trend continued, foreign US debt started to rise after September 2001, and Bush handed over more than $3 trillion of National debt to Barak Obama in 2009, with a considerable trend upwards since the financial crisis hit the nation in 2008. Only recently this upward trend started to level off slightly, and foreign debt is now just below $4.5 trillion. Besides China, as the largest single holder of foreign US debt, the liabilities are spread around the globe, with a considerable amount of debt being held by some of the other indebted economies such as the United Kingdom (as the country with the largest external debt of European countries). The following map shows the countries of the world resized according to the total amount of US treasury securities that are held in that country. It uses the most recent data published by the US Treasury:
Maps for the 21st Century
499 years after Mercator’s birth we may feel that the age of discovery is long gone. We seem to have explored almost every patch of our planet, considerably supported by Mercator’s famous world map that allowed sailors for the first time to reliably navigate across the world’s oceans. His innovation was a significant contribution to the early days of globalisation. Globalisation has turned our planet into a human planet, where people have become a substantial component of the processes that influence our livelihoods – some go as far as calling this a new geological era, the anthropocene. But while we have maps and images of every spot of the earth, we do not fully understand the human environments and interrelations to the natural environment. Normal maps show where sheep and other lovely creatures of nature live but hide much of the so important populous spaces of humanity.
The maps that I created as part of my PhD research are based on a novel cartogram mapping technique, deploying Gastner/Newman’s diffusion-based cartogram algorithm in a new way. The maps give every person living on this planet the same amount of space, while reducing the least populated places to a minimum. The map projection is calculated from an equally distributed population grid so that, unlike in other cartograms, the transformed grid cells preserve an accurate geographical reference. This allows us to map a diverse range of geographical layers on top of the population projection. The new maps show the social and physical environment in relation to population and provide a fresh perspective on the complex geography of the 21st century world. The following animation shows a series of maps that demonstrate the visual capabilities of the technique (the video can be switched to HD resolution by clicking the 360p note in the bottom panel):
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The Disappearance of Childhood
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.
(The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman)
In the previous post I showed a map of the global distribution of malnutrition among the youngest children. To complete this picture, I used the same subnational Global Poverty Data from SEDAC and combined the data about the proportion of children with the total population (derived from the GPW database). Where information was missing, I used information from the national-level UN World Population Prospects to complete the data and generated a grid of the global distribution of children on a subnational level. The result of this is a new gridded cartogram display of the world’s children (aged under 5) which shows each grid cell resized according to the total number of children living there (as in many world maps on this website, I use the worldmapper colour scheme for the countries which makes the map easier to read). The following map therefore gives every child under the age of five the same amount of space, with additional information about the variation beyond the country borders. This is today’s world of children:
Hungry Children
After several of weeks in the headlines, the United Nations has eventually declared a famine in parts of the Horn of Africa today after large parts of the people there suffer from the worst drought in decades. Malnutrition is a much wider ranging problems in the poorer parts of the world, although it only comes to our mind when we see headlines as we do today. There are startling facts about malnutrition that are very contradictory to the wasteful lifestyles in the wealthy parts of the planet (a recent FAO study suggests that one third of the world’s food goes to waste): Continue reading
7 Billion
On July 11, 1987 the world population reached an unprecedented 5 billion, which was acknowledged with the establishment of World Population Day on that day ever since then. With the world’s population believed to reach 7 billion some time this year, this will obviously be a symbolic day (like it was back in 1987). But nobody knows how many of us are there exactly on this planet, and the number is constantly changing anyway. A nice animation of global statistics is shown in Worldometers, a website which turns all kinds of global statistics into live counts based on the estimated changes; at the time of writing this, the world population according to that website was at exactly 6,976,723,755…785…843…and counting; we also welcomed more than 208,000 new citizen to this planet while we also had to say goodbye to more than 95,700. Well, this is what World Population Day apparently is about: Making us think about the significance of population trends and related issues.
The worldmapper contribution to this year’s world population day is an updated version of the world population cartogram. The new map shows the countries of the world resized according to the total number of people living in each country in 2011 (using UNPD estimates). In a quick update, the world’s newest country South Sudan is also integrated in this map, so that this is the most recent population view that one can get of today’s countries:
