europe

I was wondering how various countries compared in their murder clearance rates, so I had to look at the data and found something rather concerning. In the US the percentage of homicides that have been solved has been steadily declining since the 1960s. This graph shows that it declined from 91%...

Ashton, an American woman from Illinois with a PhD in human geography, urban planning and architecture, who moved to Freiburg in Germany 5 years ago, decided to compare how much money someone would earn in the US vs Germany was a similar job and life situation once all the taxes, social security...

I often hear that American supermarkets are much bigger and have a greater diversity of products than in Europe. For example this American guy who has lived 5 years in the Netherlands (but apparently nowhere else in Europe) says that he prefers life in general in Europe, but that the shopping...

Statistics about religious beliefs evolve surprisingly quickly. In the USA the number of non-religious people has been increasing steadily by about 1% per year in the last 20 years. The same trend can be seen in Europe, although religiosity has fallen much faster in some countries than others...

It may sound like a strange question. Many Westerners still have an image of Sub-Saharan Africa as an underdeveloped place where people live in huts and hunt with spears like in the early 20th century. But even if some tribes of hunter-gatherers survive in isolated parts of the continent, this...

Here are some of the biggest construction projects at the moment.

Euronews : Real teacher salaries in Europe are down. Which countries pay the highest and lowest wages? This article has a very detailed analysis of teachers' salaries at pre-school, primary and secondary level by country, comparing: Average annual gross actual salaries Annual gross statutory...

About 9% of global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the methane emitted from cattle flatulence. Additionally, large swathes of the Amazon rainforest are being destroyed (usually burned) to expand cattle ranching. Tropical deforestation itself is responsible for 10% of global warming, and...

LGBT rights have come a long way since 2001 when the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage. Many Western European countries followed suit soon afterwards and gay marriage has been adopted by even more nations, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, in the...

The Guardian: Germany legalises possession of cannabis for personal use The new law will allow the growth of up to three plants for private consumption, holding 50g of cannabis at home, or 25g in public. This makes Germany the third European Union member state to legalise cannabis for personal...

It may be due to the Covid-19 effect or just the economy catching up, but in only two years many countries have seen their percentage of Internet users rise quite a lot, as can be seen on the two maps below. If data is correct, the share of Internet users dropped in a few countries though...

I have just updated the map of modern slavery based on the Global Slavery Index. There are some interesting evolutions. In 2018, slavery was almost completely absent from Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Austria. However in 2023, that was only the case of Norway. The other...

Here is a new map showing the social security benefits of an average worker as a percentage of their previous earnings in the OECD. The beneficiaries in question are retired workers, disabled workers, and aged widows and widowers. This data does not include unemployment benefits. The most...

This map is based on the data from the CIA World Factbook as reported on Wikipedia. The percentages indicated for the increase of decrease in obesity rates are the difference between the rates for 2016 and for 2024. For example, in the United Kingdom the rate decreased from 27.8% in 2016 to...

Trains are a great way to travel around Europe and new high-speed lines are being built all the time. Switzerland is the best country overall when it comes to train, be it for the punctuality, cleanliness of trains and stations, organisation or ease of use. The Netherlands probably comes second...

I was wondering what Europe would look like if the various separatist movements had their way. I checked the list of active separatist movements in Europe and selected only the regions with reasonable claims of independence based on the percentage of population supporting independence. This is...

Over 10 years ago I wrote an article called What differentiates Europeans from Americans: the cultural gap across the Atlantic. I last updated it 5 years ago to add some more differences I had forgotten. One thing I did not mention, as it's not strictly speaking a difference between the US and...

Tax rates vary hugely between countries. When it comes to personal income tax, some countries have flat rates regardless of income size, while others have progressive rates. But while some progressive rates start from 0%, others start much higher (like in Belgium, from 25%). Some countries have...

GDP per capita is often used as a proxy to determine how much people earn in average in a country. In many cases it can be a relatively good approximation, but sometimes it's completely wrong. This is because the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of all the money produced in a country...

Here is my latest map based on data from the World Bank. The map shows the percentage of people aged 15+ who have an account with a bank or other financial institution that provides mobile money services. It doesn't necessarily mean that those people are using mobile banking or other mobile...