Excuse the cheap pun – I do not mean to make a train announcement. Today, I’d like to introduce an awesome tool to you guys: Gapminder.

It allows you to create a great number of statistics and charts based on a huge variety of reliable, current data (very often based on UN organizations). So basically, it’s all about illustrating the widening gap between rich and poor. You can compare many nations in regard to e.g. annual income, gender equality, literacy, …

Just to give you an example: The chart below compares Life Expectancy & GDP per capita of 182 nations in the year 2013. Each bubble is a country. Size is population. Color is region. And I quickly highlighted the location of Lao PDR (the tiny bubble inside the big Indian one) and Germany for you. For better clarity, you can depict only nations of your choice as well.

Sorry for the bad quality. Check out the original here: http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/gapminder-world-poster-2013/

Personally, I found it very informative and eyeopening. Visual facts just tend to be more impressive than written ones… If you are further interested in this, you can download the complete software for free and use it offline. Check it out:

Downloads