From Clio Infrastructure
Gapminder
The Gapminder Foundation (associated with Karolinska Institute, Stockholm) is dedicated to produce sophisticated on-line statistics that clarify global trends in inequality in health and well-being. For demonstrations, visit the site of Gapminder. Dynamic scattergrams visualize changing continental and national positions on a host of indicators. Currently, the site offers more than 200 indicators on economic, social, demographic, environmental and educational developments and attracts more than a million visitors a year who actually use the visualization tool.
At the moment, most of the data are limited to the period after 1960 and although an indication of data quality is provided, the documentation of the data is rather limited. Gapminder and CLIO-INFRA have agreed to join forces in the sense that historical data will be added to the existing datasets, and that extended documentation clarifying data standards, sources and estimation techniques will be made available. Also, download facilities will be improved.
Example of Gapminder: real income per capita and life expectancy in three countries 1800-2007
Examples of dynamic graphs
CLIO-INFRA will enrich the current Gapminder already impressive list of variables with new one, such as the the political systems of nations. For a correlation between polity and GNP, see this example:
Schooling and income, US States. In the mid-1800s schooling is not the decisive factor in a state's wealth, natural resources are possibly more important. That is the reason why the state incomes spread so much. From the 1880s, however, schooling seems to become an increasingly better predictor of income. We can also see a strong convergence in terms of schooling and income among the USA states during the 20th century.
