Visualizing Global Poverty & Inequality
Wednesday, August 23rd, 2017
I recently applied for a position at the Center for Global Development, part of which involved a take-home exercise visualizing data from the World Bank's Poverty and Equity Database. I figured I'd share the code and results here. That said, if you're really interested in learning about global poverty and inequality, I highly recommend checking out Our World in Data, an excellent web publication by Max Roser.
The data, tracking various poverty and inequality measurements by country annually since 1975, is unfortunately extremely patchy, with about 90% of values missing. Even with interior interpolation, that only gets you to about 30%. If the assignment had allowed it, I'd recommend combining sources for a more complete dataset, but that's for another time. Despite the limitations, I'd like to think the figures I put together tell an interesting story. Enjoy!
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