Information is Beautiful: International Number Ones
There is a site on the Web called “Information is Beautiful”. I am not sure but I might have mentioned this site in a previous posting. On the “Information is Beautiful” site they find and post about 'informational' illustrations from around the Web.
One of the illustrations on Information is Beautiful is the “International Number Ones”.
This illustration [Ctrl+Click here or on the illustration to go to full sized illustration at the Information is Beautiful site] shows what some of the countries around the world are “number one” at.
Some of the number ones are surprising. For example Australia gets the prize for being the country with the most car thefts per capita. Thailand wins for being the country that uses the most condoms per capita. And Ireland is mentioned because it has the best quality of life of any country in the world (which I found very interesting).
If you want to check into any of the background data, as always, the Information is Beautiful site provides links to their sources. The source data links for the illustration is summarised in a spreadsheet available here. Using the links provided in this spreadsheet you can then find the source of all of the number ones, and the source of the car theft data for Australia came from here.
The source data for the car thefts is interesting. The following graphic, from the referral site in the spreadsheet linked above, shows the top 10 car theft countries.
Australia, which is number one, has seven cars stolen per 1,000 people. The USA, which is 9th, only has 3.8 cars stolen per 1,000 people. Canada is 7th—who would have thought?
Following is the Quality of Life index used by Information is Beautiful. I wanted to see where Australia ranks, and also where the USA ranks, so I have pulled off the top 13.
These rankings are by The Economist and were scored out of 10. Interestingly no country even got into the 9s with Ireland making the top of the list with a score of 8.3.
Australia made it to 6th spot. The USA is 13th.
