Gapminder
I’ve stumbled upon an interesting statistics visualisation tool. It’s made by Swedish Gapminder foundation. They have thought up some clever ways to display information. Their tool is called Trendalyzer and you can find it in various incarnations on the web: at Gapminder’s official site, at the UN and at Google. For all three you need to have Flash plugin installed in your browser. If you don’t like that, you can also get an executable file from gapminder.org (~3.5 MB).
Here are some examples:
The available data allows us to take a look at world development of the last 30 years. The trends that emerge should make us optimistic: world is becoming a better place. It is also clear that most improvement occurred in Asia, and it seems to me beyond doubt that India and China liberalizing their economies was the cause of that. It would be great if same policies could somehow be made to work in Africa too.