2/20/2010

Stat Planet

This website gives a map of the world and then gives us several choices of what kind of data we would like to look at. There is HDI, GDP, Health, Educations and much more to choose from. You can also change to scales around to fit what you prefer.
As we have talked about in class I used the HDI setting and compared the U.S. to Haiti. The U.S. came out at a .96 and Haiti at .53 where the larger number means you're better off. I tried to compare the Dominican Republic with Haiti but this has classified Dominican Republic as part of the U.S.

6 comments:

Dr. Tufte said...

This is an interesting site, with a lot of possibilities.

Sebastian said...
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Sebastian said...

I definitely enjoyed this site. One thing that I thought to be interesting is that one of the country with a higher GDP per capita in 2010 is a country in Southeast Asia called Brunei. After a closer look, according to the cia.gov, this country has many more problems including a significantly higher infant mortality rate, literacy rate, and school life expectancy. This just goes to reaffirm the idea that although GDP per capita is a good measure, it is by no means perfect. Here is the link for the CIA website.

Kit said...

A comment on another post about a potential incoming tsunami (from the quake in Chile) set to hit Jamaica prompted me to compare the HDI rating of Chili, Haiti, and Jamaica. Interestingly, Jamaica falls almost exactly between Haiti and Chili. I also compared Jamaica and Haiti using some of the same statistics that Sebastian used on the cia.gov website. Jamaica actually had a far worse rating in many categories when compared to Haiti.

Dr. Tufte said...

Brunei is a good poster child for why GDP per capita can be a bad measure. Essentially Brunei is still run as an absolute monarchy in which everything belongs to the sultan. So it has the same measurement problems as Saudi Arabia.

As to Jamaica, it's been a political horror story for decades. All the features are there for growth, but the political class has largely ruined them through mismanagement. If you go back to the Excel workbook on the G drive that graphs per capita real GDP for 2 countries, it shows that Jamaica was closing fast on Chile in the 1950's and 1960's, but that it faltered in the late 1970's.

Why is that so?

One policy explanation is that a new government elected in 1972 placed a tax on Jamaica's primary export - probably out of misplaced focus on the small percentage of profit made by foreign companies rather than the large percentage of revenue left inside the country.

One cultural explanation is that the party that lost the 1972 election resorted to mob violence to destabilize the new government.

Victoria said...

I have really enjoyed this webpage; I have been playing with it for a while. I like the way they compare education expenditures per country. I found it interesting that countries in Africa like Botswana, Kenya, Eritrea spend more money on education that other countries like the US