Correlations between world statistics

Every indicator on this site is compared with every other. These are the 5 relationships that survived testing — measured across countries, then re-measured with population and national income held constant, so that a pair which only reflects country size is discarded rather than published.

Read these carefully

A correlation shows that two numbers move together across countries. It does not show that one causes the other. Both may follow something else entirely, and with tens of thousands of indicators some pairs will line up by chance. Each page below states how many countries were compared and how much of the relationship survived controlling for size — the smaller that second number, the more sceptical you should be.