1. Check out the Gapminder website at http://www.gapminder.org/. Choose "Gapminder World."
a. Choose a variable from the list of possible y-axis variables that you think might be affected by the rate of a countries economic growth or income per capita. Why did you select this variable? How do you think this variable is affected by economic growth or per capita income?
In clicking on the y-axis, there are a list of variables that spring out on a list. The broader categories include children per woman, CO2 emissions, income per person, child mortality, life expectancy, economy, society, education, energy, environment, health, infrastructure, population and work. The author of this response has a few answers to the question above about how many of those variables are affected by economic growth and per capita income.
One easy-to-see variable that can be described that way is health. The health of a country is certainly affected by economic growth and per capita income as countries that perform better in these regards would be better able to pay for healthcare both at the governmental and consumer level. Countries that suffer in this regard would have a harder time paying for healthcare so the prevailing health of such a nation would tend to be much poorer.
Another example would be infrastructure as many to most road and bridge projects are funded by gas taxes and other taxes and one has to have per capita income levels that are high as well as economic growth to fund those taxes without the rates being high and punitive. Both of these variables were...
Select Economic growth over the past 10 years (it is located under "For advanced users") for the x-axis and the variable of your choice from part a for the y-axis. Hit "play" and watch the data move over time. Is there any relationship you can discern between Economic Growth and the variable you chose?
The answer is a clear "yes" for infrastructure when looking at something like the percentage of paved roads. North and South America as well as Asia and even Asia perform quite well more often than not while countries in Africa do much poorer. Areas of North/South America (presumably South more than North) and parts of Southeast Asia also do quite poorly as well.
Much the same trend is easy to see when looking at newborn death rates and causes, which is under health. Africa is clearly the worst off with South Asia being a close second. East Asia/Pacific is clear mixed and South and North America are in the mid to upper range of the performance metrics, which surely varies widely between North and South America as the range of economic achievement tends to sap as one moves south and just about everything south of the United States is underachieving or otherwise behind the curve.
Movement over time is also quite easy to notice as all areas generally improve but some move much slower than normal in areas like South Asia and Africa. Even North and South America improve over time but they've always been high in the last 10 years so the improvement is less noticeable.
