Our World in Data

All three statements are true at the same time—

Check it out! ourworldindata.org/latest And let us know what you think by replying here in the comments. We love feedback and consider all of it.

🔧 Website upgrade: You can now filter our latest work by topic and type (data insights, articles, etc.) This makes it easier than ever to find exactly what you’re interested in. Pick a topic by selecting one of the buttons at the top: Population and Demographic Change, Health, Energy and Environment, and many more. See all our work on that topic, or narrow it down to our bite-sized data insights, longer-form articles, or data updates and other announcements.

Has Our World in Data been useful to you? We’d love to hear about it! Tell us about it in our two-question survey: buff.ly/DGIp31Z Maybe our work helped you understand a global issue, explain something clearly to someone else, think differently about a problem, or make a decision. In your work, studies, or anywhere else in your life. Thank you! This really helps us understand how our work is being useful for others.

Explore coffee production data for all countries: ourworldindata.org/grapher/coffee…

Coffee production has shifted toward Asia over the last six decades— Coffee is part of daily life for millions of people around the world. It’s also a key source of income and employment in many countries. In this chart, I want to focus on the shift in where it is grown over the last six decades. The chart shows the breakdown of global green coffee bean production by region, from 1961 to 2024. Green coffee beans are those that haven’t yet been roasted. South America has been the largest producing region throughout this period, but its share of global output has fallen, as has Africa’s. The biggest story is the growth of coffee production in Asia: it went from producing less than 5% of the world’s coffee in the early 1960s to about 32% today. Much of Asia’s growth comes from Vietnam, where production rose from around 5,000 tonnes in the early 1980s to about 2 million tonnes today. It now produces more than all African countries combined. This expansion was driven largely by the spread of Robusta, a hardier and higher-yielding variety than Arabica, which is the type that dominates Latin American production. Brazil is the world’s largest producer, while Vietnam is now second. Colombia used to be in that position, but Vietnam overtook it in 1999. (This Data Insight was written by @EOrtizOspina.)

Explore the updated data in our interactive charts: ourworldindata.org/search?q=AI+In…

A few years ago, around half of companies said they used AI in at least one business function. Now it’s nearly 9 in 10, as you can see in the chart. It’s important to note that “use” covers a wide range, from a few employees experimenting with AI to it being fully scaled across the organization. McKinsey finds that only around 7% of organizations have fully scaled it. Still, the overall trend is clear: AI use in companies has risen sharply in just a few years. The data comes from McKinsey's annual “State of AI” survey, compiled by Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI in its 2026 AI Index Report. The AI Index brings together data from dozens of sources to track how AI is being developed, deployed, used, and regulated, making it one of the most comprehensive annual overviews of the field. Our colleague Veronika Samborska recently updated our charts with the latest release. The AI Index is published each spring, so our next update will be around April 2027.

Read more and learn what children are dying from in your country with our interactive visualization tool: ourworldindata.org/five-million-c…

Five million children die every year. This is not only devastating due to the pain and loss that it represents, but also because most of these deaths are preventable. To stop them, we need to understand what children are dying from. We’ve built a new interactive visualization to help do this. At a global level, both infectious diseases and birth disorders (which are dominated by preterm births and neonatal suffocation) dominate deaths among children under five. Each category accounts for over 40% of the total. The remaining deaths are caused by non-communicable diseases, such as cancer, or accidents such as drowning, road injuries, or fire. This picture looks very different across income levels. In poorer countries, infectious diseases are even more prominent. In rich countries, they are far rarer, and non-communicable diseases and injuries account for a larger share. What this data also reveals is that there are huge gaps in child mortality rates between countries. This is good news: it means we already know how to prevent most of these five million children dying. The first step is knowing what they’re dying from. That’s what this new visualization tries to do.

Explore the latest data on electric car sales across the world: ourworldindata.org/electric-car-s…

One in four cars sold in 2025 was electric. The International Energy Agency (IEA) just published its latest annual Global EV Outlook. It provides estimates for electric vehicle sales in 2025. One in four (25%) cars sold in 2025 were electric, more than double the share from just four years earlier. But there are large differences in adoption rates across the world. This chart shows new sales shares by country. In Norway, almost every new car is an electric one. In China, more than half are, while in the United States, it’s just 10%. These figures include fully electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. You can find this data broken down by vehicle type in this chart. (This Data Insight was written by @_HannahRitchie.)

Read and subscribe here: ourworldindatabrief.substack.com/p/2026-05-22

The latest OWID Brief newsletter is out on Substack! It delivers all our recent work plus curated highlights from across Our World in Data, right to your inbox twice a month. This edition: Our new population projections tool, childhood stunting, China’s electricity growth, and much more. In each edition we also share some of what our team has been reading lately. This time: an updated career guide from the nonprofit 80,000 Hours, and an FT article by John Burn-Murdoch where he makes the case that smartphones and digital media play a role in falling fertility rates.

Explore the updated data in our interactive charts: ourworldindata.org/search?dataset…

How much do countries reduce income inequality through taxes and transfers? Most countries reduce income inequality through taxes and transfers — taxing higher incomes more, and redistributing through benefits like pensions, unemployment support, and family allowances. But how much each country reduces inequality varies a lot, as you can see in the chart. This data comes from the OECD Income Distribution Database (IDD), one of the few internationally harmonized sources that measures income inequality both before and after taxes and transfers. Our colleague @parriagadap recently updated our charts with the latest release from the OECD. It now covers 45 countries (OECD members plus select non-members) with annual data going back to 1976. The OECD updates the IDD on a rolling basis, and we plan to refresh our charts annually.

Subscribe to our Data Insights newsletter to receive our bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, right to your inbox every few days: ourworldindata.org/subscribe

Explore the latest data on electric car sales across the world: ourworldindata.org/electric-car-s…

Global sales of combustion engine cars peaked in 2017— To decarbonize road transport, the world must move away from petrol and diesel cars towards electric vehicles and other forms of low-carbon transport. This transition has already started. In fact, global sales of combustion engine cars are well past their peak and are now falling. As you can see in the chart, global sales peaked in 2017. This is calculated based on data from the International Energy Agency. Bloomberg New Energy Finance also estimated this peak occurred around that time. Sales of electric cars, on the other hand, are growing quickly. They more than doubled in the three years from 2022 to 2025. (This Data Insight was written by @_HannahRitchie.)

Read more in the article by @MaxCRoser: ourworldindata.org/breaking-the-m…

For much of human history, our ancestors were trapped in an economy in which incomes were determined by the size of the population. The Industrial Revolution ended this Malthusian economy and made it possible for a country to leave abject poverty behind.