Timeseries

Fifty-seven rankings that carry a year-by-year series and can be played back as an animated bar chart race, spanning every field from economics to the environment.

One habit serves all of them: check the years covered and how many entities report in each year before reading anything else. Some series are built on five-yearly censuses and others update annually, and the number of countries with a value often changes across the chart. Where a line begins partway through or breaks off, the cause is usually the statistics rather than a change in reality.