Our World in Data

All three statements are true at the same time—

@EOrtizOspina Explore the data on the adoption of communication technologies in our interactive chart: ourworldindata.org/grapher/ict-ad…

India went from 15% to 70% Internet access in a decade, mostly through mobile phones— (This Data Insight was written by @EOrtizOspina.) In 2018, my colleague Max Roser wrote an article titled “The Internet’s history has just begun”. His point was that while the Internet had already changed the world, large changes lay ahead because billions of people weren’t using it yet. In this chart, I revisit that observation using more recent data from India, the world’s most populous country. When Max wrote his article, roughly one in five people in India were online. The chart shows that since then, adoption has grown much faster than in the decades before. Today, more than 70% of India’s population is online — close to the global average. When you look at related trends in the adoption of communication technologies, you see that much of the sudden acceleration in growth after 2018 was driven by mobile phones. Mobile phone subscriptions in India took off in the early 2000s and had already reached 75 per 100 people by 2015. Internet access accelerated through its mobile networks, which were made affordable by new technologies and market competition — including a major market disruption, which started in 2016 when a new low-cost entrant drove down prices.

This data comes from the American Time Use Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our colleague Tuna Acisu recently updated our charts with the latest release. Explore the updated data in our interactive charts: ourworldindata.org/search?dataset…

As they get older, Americans spend more time alone, but surveys show this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lonely.

Who do Americans spend time with? This changes a lot over the course of their lives. 🧵

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Explore teenage pregnancy data for individual countries: ourworldindata.org/grapher/adoles…

Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen across all regions in the last few decades. The chart shows the number of live births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 since 2000, based on data compiled by the United Nations. Globally, rates have fallen by over one-third. This decline has been even more dramatic in some regions. For example, rates have fallen by over three-quarters in Central and South Asia. Birth rates have also fallen among adolescents aged 10 to 14 years old, where health concerns for pregnancy in such young girls are even greater. (This Data Insight was written by @_HannahRitchie and @parriagadap.)

Learn more in our article: ourworldindata.org/historical-pan…

Pandemics have killed millions of people throughout history. How many deaths were caused by different pandemics, and how have researchers estimated their death tolls?

Check out our first edition. We hope you enjoy it! And if you do, please share. 🙏 → ourworldindatabrief.substack.com/p/2026-04-27

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We now have a publication on Substack! → ourworldindatabrief.substack.com It features The OWID Brief, our flagship newsletter that delivers our latest work plus curated highlights from across Our World in Data, right to your inbox 2x/month. We also share interesting things our team has been reading.

Explore other inequality indicators in our Economic Inequality Data Explorer: ourworldindata.org/explorers/ineq…

What is the most unequal country in South America? It depends on what metric you look at. One way to measure income inequality is to look at the share of all income that goes to the top income earners. The chart plots this for all seven South American countries with comparable 2022 pre-tax income estimates in the World Inequality Database. The difference between the left and right bars is which earners they cover: the richest 10% on the left, the richest 0.1% on the right. Looking at the left-hand bars, Colombia ranks top. It has the highest share going to the richest 10%, followed by Chile, Brazil, and Peru — in these four countries, the top 10% share earns more than half of all income. This is high relative to other countries around the world. But looking at the dark blue bars on the right, the rankings change. Peru’s richest 0.1% receive about 22% of income, the highest in the region by far, and actually the highest in the world that year. This chart shows just two metrics, but you would also get different pictures if you looked at Gini coefficients or the distribution of wealth instead. So, what is the most unequal country in South America? It depends on what metric you look at. This is a region with high inequalities, but different indicators will tell you different stories depending on which part of the distribution you examine, and how incomes are measured. (This Data Insight was written by @EOrtizOspina.)

Check out a country profile: #country-profile-selector" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">ourworldindata.org/health-meta#co…

🩺 Explore key health metrics for your country We’ve published new country profiles on health for every country in the world. Each profile tells the story of a single country: how long people typically live, what they die from, what progress is being made against major diseases & risk factors, what share of children receive key vaccinations, and much more — all in one place. The image here is a snippet from the United States’ profile showing estimates for how many people die prematurely as a result of various risk factors, such as high blood pressure, obesity, and smoking. Many charts in each profile automatically include comparisons to other countries — e.g., in the same geographic region or at a similar income level — so you can understand each country in context.