China vs. Saudi Arabia

Methodology

Each indicator shows the same year for every country: the latest year, up to last year, for which at least 24 of the 30 countries have figures. That keeps comparisons like for like — a country whose statistics office publishes early is never set against another country's older number. The year is shown beside every figure.

GDP, GDP per person, real growth, inflation, government debt and population come from the IMF World Economic Outlook, which is revised each April and October; figures for the most recent year are partly IMF estimates. Interest on government debt is the share of general government spending that goes on interest, calculated from two series in the IMF's Public Finances in Modern History — interest paid and total spending, each as a percentage of GDP — for the same country and year; a second row sets the same interest against government revenue, the ratio rating agencies use, which is higher wherever borrowing pays for part of spending. Both count interest only: repaying the debt itself is financing rather than spending, and most of it is refinanced with new borrowing. The IMF series has no figure for Singapore. Unemployment is the World Bank's ILO-modelled rate, which applies one definition to every country and can therefore differ from the rate a national statistics office publishes. Life expectancy, urban population, internet use, land area and CO₂ emissions per person (excluding land use) come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators. The Human Development Index is published by the UN Development Programme and taken from Our World in Data.

Money figures are in current US dollars at market exchange rates, not adjusted for purchasing power. Population density is population divided by land area. The real GDP chart compounds the IMF's annual real growth rates from a base year set to 100, so it shows how each economy has grown rather than how large it is.

Where one direction is clearly better, the stronger of the two figures carries a dot. Inflation never does: very low inflation is not simply better than moderate inflation, and a page that marked it as a win would be making an argument the numbers do not support.

The figures are checked against their sources every week and the pages rebuild whenever one of them changes, which in practice means a handful of times a year. The World Bank and Our World in Data series are published under CC BY 4.0; the IMF figures are used under the IMF's terms of use.