Calculi's Politics Blog

Countries doubling their income

It took China only 12 years to double its GDP per person (in PPP) from $1300 to $2600. And China will need only 7 years to double it from the present level or $8400. And India is following, too, though not as quick as China, but much quicker than the developed countries.

… GDP per person in both China and India could double from 2011 levels by the end of this decade. People in the developed economies will have to wait another quarter century to see their incomes double.

Source: GDP per person: Double your income! | The Economist.

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Tracking Diasporas

MORE Chinese people live outside mainland China than French people live in France, with some to be found in almost every country. Some 22m ethnic Indians are scattered across every continent.

The diaspora is the word which was initially used for ‘dispersed’ Jews from the their homeland in further history. Now it is commonly used for dispersed people of any community either due to geopolitical or personal reasons. No Doubt, Chinese and Indians account for majority of them in present world. This graphic shows how they are distributed all over the world.

To listen to an interview with Rober Guest, an author of “Borderless Economics”, follow the link!

Source: Diasporas: Mapping migration | The Economist.

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Incarceration rates

The United States has only 5% of the global population but houses a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

This itself is strikingly sad fact. Moreover,

Black non-Hispanic males are incarcerated at a rate more than 6 times higher than white non-Hispanic males and 2.6 times higher than Hispanic males.

As usual, scandinavian countries fare the best.

Read more at: Incarceration rates around the world.

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Suppressed blogger of our world

Part of a project of GlobalVoices Advocacy, this cartographic survey gives simple statistics on suppressed online voices around the world. It’s no surprise that China tops the number, but no surprise either, that recent middle-east uprising is increase in number of such bloggers. But bigger surprise to find any such suppressed bloggers in western open societies. The website disclosing these data has interactive feature to look for them separately.

Source: Threatened Voices | Tracking suppression of online free speech.

Popularity: 56% [?]

Arm sales

Arm sales is one such kind of business, where, irrespective what american-styled free market believes, strong government support and intervention is needed. Perhaps it is the most corrupt form of trade which keeps domestic government as well as international agencies blind. Very few arm sales are transparent enough. Maybe it is due to various reasons: open arm sales sometimes create aggresive anti-sales sentiment in the seller country (like Germany) or the seller country has geopolitical wasted interest in the region of buyers or defence state executives have their own wasted interest in promoting their associated arm developing MNCs. It is not a surprise that arm sales is very profitable business, even in recession. The following infographic gives you how it has changed since 2001.

Global arm sales via good.is

Prosperity also increases the defence spending, but not necessarily (see Syria, Venezuela, Pakistan, etc.). For fast-growing countries it makes sense to modernize its weaponary or get involved into intense global affairs as a formidable military power. For example, India is the second largest buyer of arms in last 8 years. India used to depend mostly on arm sales from Russia, but it has diversified the arm buying portfolio last couple of years, mostly after nuclear deal with USA. And one sees even in this bad economic times, the country, in particular like USA, has managed to increase its arm sales to new profits. Although China is the fourth largest buyer of the arms, it is also one of the top arm sellers. At the moment, China’s share is pretty small, but definitely it is going to increase in next couple of decades. But for the moment, USA is the sole largest seller of the arms with share more than 60%. It seems really scary looking at realpolitik disasters of its foreign policy. As long as these arm sales doesn’t include nuclear weapons, one should not worry about the end of the world.

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Improving life in Iraq

Empirical data is still the best method to analyze any sort of situation. Present vital data explaining life in Iraq shows the situation is changing in positive direction. The whole Iraq war was big mistake and political blunder. But all the mistakes should be undone and present data shows that life is moving towards better ends. This infographics shows it all.

Improving state of Iraq

Click on the image or source below to get the full version of the graphic.

source: How life in Iraq has changed

Popularity: 72% [?]

World Recession Map

At Moody’s website, popularly called Economy.com, the global recession is stated in a detailed interactive map. More than a year has passed from the economic shock of 2008, and most part of the world seems to be recovering. As usual, Asia-Pacific block should not fear about the recovery and it is expanding, perhaps the expansion is not as quick as during those glory days. But clearly it can be seen how the international map of economy has changed ever since.

Global recession status

Honestly I’m not very much impressed by the quality of the plot. It gives you information just qualitatively, not with acutal data. I guess the main aim of this map was to give overall picture of the health of world economy. And at the moment, it doesn’t seem that bad.

source: Global Recession Map

Popularity: 98% [?]

America’s wealthiest religions

It’s a great infographics showing how the wealth is distributed among people of different religious followings. To my surprise, according to this statistics, the wealthiest religions comes out to be Hindu and Jew. Perhaps these include immigrants or green card holders who enjoy privilege of getting high paid jobs mostly due to their higher education. Money controls the power. No wonder that american foreign and economic policies are somehow influenced by these wealthy groups.

Source: Transparency: America’s Wealthiest Religions

Popularity: 81% [?]