A view with no home country — treaty-text diffs, cross-country patterns, the official record read in every language.
WHO estimates for 185 economies: the steepest percentage declines were in small former-Soviet states that began far above the world average, while the world's largest populations saw more modest drops.
Across 139 economies with comparable World Bank data, the median gap between a country's average bound tariff and its average applied rate was 13 percentage points in 2021; nearly three in five exceed 10 points, and two in five exceed 20 — average headroom the rules leave in principle, though the binding constraint is set line by line.
Both countries file to the same UN database, and freight costs usually push the importer's number higher. For four straight years India's ran lower instead; in 2023 the gap flipped back.
Eurostat bilateral data for Russia and the three transit hubs named in EU circumvention-risk guidance, read together, surfaces what the Russia-only ledger misses.
In 2012 the World Health Assembly adopted a collective target — a 50% cut in anemia among women of reproductive age. Country by country, WHO's modeled estimates through 2023 show how far the world sits from it.
Among the 20 most-endemic countries in 2015, none had cut its rate 75% by 2024, the latest year of data — Rwanda came closest at 74.96%. The WHO South-East Asia Region cut its rate by more than two-thirds. The WHO African Region barely moved.
Aichi Target 11 named a single global figure — 17% of terrestrial and inland-water areas — and a single deadline at Nagoya in 2010. By the land-area measure, most economies with data sit below it.
194 governments endorsed the goal in 2013. We read the WHO's modeled prevalence for all 140 economies over a million people: 48 hit the 30% cut and 14 saw smoking rise — and the low-income group beat the target as a bloc while the upper-middle-income world lags furthest behind.
In 2015 every UN member pledged under Target 16.1 to reduce violent death 'everywhere.' We read the World Bank's latest homicide rate for every economy: national income barely sorts the ranking (correlation -0.20), and the top of it is upper-middle-income Latin America, not the poorest countries.
We read both governments' filings to UN Comtrade for 2021-2024. On goods heading north the two ledgers agree within about 1%. On goods heading south the importer records a fifth less than the exporter ships — the opposite of what freight costs predict — and the hole grew every year: $55B, $58B, $61B, $71B from 2021 to 2024.
We read Eurostat's own excessive-deficit filings for all 27 members. Twelve exceed the debt ceiling, eleven the deficit limit — but only seven breach both, and the biggest debtors are rarely the biggest deficit-runners. Greece carries the bloc's largest debt, 154% of GDP, and still ran a surplus.
We read every economy on the UN's debt-sustainability gauge for 2023. Twenty-eight now spend a fifth or more of what they export servicing external debt — yet low-income countries' median, 10.5%, sits below both middle-income tiers. On this gauge the debt load does not deepen with poverty.
We read the World Bank's 2024 access figures for all 215 reporting economies. Access is nearly universal in the cities — 98% globally — and the shortfall has collapsed onto the village: DR Congo reaches 55% of its urban residents and 1% of its rural ones, and eight countries hold half the people still in the dark.
We read every economy's own vital statistics: 7 of the 42 shrinking economies have fertility at or above replacement, while the famous low-fertility giants — China, Italy, Thailand — sit at the shallow end of the decline, not the steep one.
Switzerland runs health through mandatory private insurance and covers barely a third of its own bill; the Gulf's petro-states fund most of theirs but divide by a hydrocarbon-heavy GDP — while Lesotho and Namibia clear a line set by how much a government spends on health relative to its GDP, not simply by national wealth.
SDG target 3.6 set a rare 2020 deadline. Measured 2010 to 2019, the deepest cuts were concentrated in Gulf and Central Asian economies that started with high death rates — while Western Europe, generally starting far lower, largely did not halve, and the United States moved the wrong way, 11.7 to 12.7 per 100,000.
120 economies clear both the 25-per-1,000 under-5 threshold and the 12-per-1,000 neonatal one; 64 clear neither. But of the dozen that split, every one of the nine still short on newborns has already beaten the child floor — the first 28 days is the harder half.
Ethiopia is the sole LDC whose 2015-2024 growth averaged the target. Not one of the 44 posted 7% in every year it reported, and across the decade the group never reached the line — it peaked at 4.8% in 2019 and sat at 3.9% in 2024.
The World Bank's own series puts the LDC average at 31% in 2024 — below the level the world as a whole had already passed in 2015, while high-income economies sit at 93%. None of the 37 reporting LDCs has reached universal; use runs from Burundi's 7% to Kiribati's 88%.
We read all 217 economies' modeled 2024 figures. Four economies over a million people sit above 1.08 — Azerbaijan, Vietnam, China and Armenia — while India, long the emblem, has eased to 1.071. The two nominal chart-toppers are very small populations where year-to-year estimates can be less stable.
Women out-enroll men in tertiary education in 130 of the 154 economies that filed a figure since 2020. The world went from 59 women per 100 men in 1970 to 112 in 2024 — and the 24 holdouts split into the poorest states and a handful of the richest.
On the ILO's 2024 modelled estimates the gap runs from a 65-point male lead in Afghanistan to a 2.5-point female lead in Burundi — widest across the Middle East and South Asia, from high-income Oman to low-income Yemen, and peaking not at the poorest economies but at the upper-middle-income ones
The median economy sits at 17.3, about 3.5 times the guideline, and 34 exceed even the weakest interim target of 35. Finland and Iceland are the only clears that aren't tiny island territories — the United States, Germany and France all miss the line.
We read the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme's 2024 estimates for every economy carrying both halves of SDG 6. Globally, safely managed drinking water (74%) outruns sanitation (58%) — yet country by country the lead flips: Morocco's water beats its sanitation by 71 points, Nepal's sanitation beats its water by 37.
The same series lands China, Brazil and Norway alike on that single 2.5% floor and can't tell which of them sit at it and which fall below. Its companion SDG indicator puts food insecurity at 10% in the United States and 14% in Brazil — the floor is the instrument's limit, not the finding.
At the 2010 deadline 2 of the 27 member states cleared 3%; at the 2020 deadline, 4; in the latest year, 6 — the same count in Eurostat's own data, which put Denmark at 3.07%. The EU-wide figure was 2.26% in 2023, fractionally below the 2.28% of its 2020 target year. The median member spends 1.56% of GDP on research — barely half the pledge — and 18 of the 27 sit below even 2%, from Sweden's 3.60% down to Romania's 0.52%.
We read every economy's latest filing in the IMF/World Bank tax series. The number most often cited for how heavily a country taxes barely tracks income, and doesn't rise with it in order — because it counts only central-government tax, drops most social security, and omits every state and local levy. So it can't be read across countries as total tax burden — the ranking is shaped by fiscal architecture as much as by how much a country taxes.
China cut its premature-NCD risk 18% and Brazil 17%. India's rose 4% — the only one of the seven most populous economies to move backward, and its numbers started slipping before the pandemic did.
Namibia meets the 4.45-per-1,000 Workforce 2030 floor with 91% of that headcount nurses and midwives, on 0.55 physicians; South Africa, Eswatini and the Philippines do the same. Across the 113 that clear the bar, 105 hold more nurses than doctors, and none clears on a doctor-heavy, nurse-thin mix — the cadre composition tilts one way.
On the WHO-led estimates, the US ratio rose from 12 to 17 deaths per 100,000 live births — now the highest in the bloc, more than double every member but Canada. The same estimators name the US as one of just four countries worldwide with a statistically significant increase since 2000 — the only G7 economy on the list.
We summed the UN's net-migration estimate for all 217 countries. Ukraine swings from −5,699,445 in 2022 to +1,146,012 in 2024, behind only the United States — and read whole, 2024's ledger tracks where wars paused more than where opportunity concentrates.
We read all 32 donors' own OECD filings: 2024 was the first year since 1995 that France, Germany, the UK and the US all cut in the same year. The preliminary 2025 numbers are worse — aid fell 23.1% in real terms, the steepest drop ever recorded, after the United States, which never formally adopted the target, shut USAID and cut roughly 57%.
We joined receiving cost with remittance dependence for 102 of them, and the correlation is 0.05. El Salvador takes in remittances worth 27.5% of its GDP at 2.00%; Cuba pays 19.63%. The number that stays stubbornly high is the one migrants actually face — the transaction-weighted global average, 6.4%, more than double our country-level median of 2.9%.
We read WHO and UNICEF's DTP3 coverage estimates for every economy, every year since 2019. The backslide isn't only poor or war-torn states — nine high-income economies miss the mark, and on measles, the disease that needs near-95% coverage, barely half the world clears even 90 on the first dose.
Read every national ledger and the net decline dissolves into a tug-of-war: China alone added half of all the forest the world gained — offsetting a quarter of the losses on a metric that counts a new plantation the same as a felled rainforest.
Five economies crossed the line in the latest year alone, one of them — Thailand — well before it grew rich. Read the whole table and the planet is still the other way: children outnumber the old more than two to one.
We read all 176 economies with a 2022 UN water-stress figure. The median country draws 10.7% of the renewable freshwater available to it after the environment's share; these 16 draw more than 100%. The overdraft isn't the thirsty desert city of the cliché — it's farming, and it runs the length of the income ladder, from Kuwait to Pakistan.
A current-account balance is one country's mirror of another's, so across the complete world they must net to nothing. The 179 economies that reported for 2023 net to +$166.7 billion instead — larger than every national surplus in the panel except China's and Germany's. The ~38 non-reporting economies are the absent counterparties, so this reporter-sum is a proxy for the IMF's long-documented global current-account discrepancy, not a measure of it. And it is not a one-year glitch: the reporting economies have summed positive every year from 2010 to 2024, after summing to a deficit through the early 2000s.
We pulled the World Bank's 2024 protected-area coverage for every economy that reports it — 213 for land, 174 for sea — and read the two halves of the 30×30 pledge side by side. In the global area-weighted totals they look alike. In the distribution they are opposites: the typical economy has designated 16.9% of its land and 1.85% of its waters, 88 of 174 protect under 2% of their seas, and 26 protect none. The near-parity in the ocean total is a composition effect — the global figure (14.0%) sits above the average economy (9.6%) and far above the median (1.85%) because it is area-weighted: economies with larger marine areas tend to have higher-than-average coverage, so the weighted total runs well above the typical country. Only 5 of the 174 clear 30% on both land and sea. Figures are designated coverage, not the 'effectively conserved and managed' the pledge asks for.
On the World Bank's 2021 renewable-energy-share series (212 economies), the number falls as income rises: low-income countries post a median 76.9%, high-income 11.6%. The 20 highest scorers are all but two in sub-Saharan Africa, and 14 of them give fewer than 15 in 100 people access to clean cooking. Iceland reports 82.4% renewable and 100% clean-cooking access; Burundi reports 83.1% and 0.2%.
Ranked across 184 governments on the IPU's 2025 count, women hold a majority or half of the lower house in seven of them — led by Rwanda at 63.8% — while the United States sits 82nd at 28.9% and Japan 141st at 15.7%. National income moves the middle of the table (high-income median 31.3% versus 19.6% for low-income states) but does not set its top.
A trade desk covers one tariff. We read the whole 2024 panel — taxes on international trade as a share of central-government revenue — and it sorts by income at the median: 15.3% for the eight low-income reporters against 0.95% for the 24 high-income ones. But the top of the panel is set by trade structure, not income: Namibia, a lower-middle-income economy, leads the 68 at 32.7%, nine points clear of the next, while France, Romania and Greece report near zero.
On the World Bank's 2023 SDG-7 tracking series, the world reached 91.6% electricity access but 74.4% clean-cooking access — a 17.2-point gap. Electricity meets or exceeds clean cooking in 183 of 189 economies; six are fully electrified yet cook clean in under half of homes: Timor-Leste (19.1%), Bangladesh (28.4%), Sri Lanka (35.4%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (39.5%), Samoa (39.7%) and Guatemala (46.5%).
On the World Bank's 2022 out-of-pocket health series (WHO health-accounts source, SH.XPD.OOPC.CH.ZS), 31 of 192 economies financed the majority of health spending directly from patients' pockets. The two highest shares belong to Turkmenistan (79.2%) and Armenia (79.1%) — both upper-middle-income — ahead of Afghanistan and Yemen. No high-income economy exceeds 50%, yet the burden tracks national income only loosely (correlation −0.42), and the world's spending-weighted average of 17.2% sits below the figure in most individual countries.
On the World Bank's 2023 life-expectancy series, the female figure exceeds the male in all 217 economies with data — no exceptions. The size of that gap spans 34-fold, from +0.4 years in Togo to +13.3 in Ukraine, and it barely tracks overall longevity: its correlation with overall life expectancy is 0.04, essentially zero. The narrowest gaps sit at both income extremes — the Sahel and the Gulf — and the widest cluster in the post-Soviet states.
Ranked by interest as a share of what a government takes in, the usual rich–poor order dissolves: Malawi (35.8%), Brazil (30.1%) and Panama (28.9%) top the list, the United States (20.3%) sits between Guinea-Bissau and Mexico, and Western Europe clusters at the bottom — Germany 2.5%, Switzerland 0.9%, Luxembourg 0.6%.
By U.S. estimates, Iran shipped about 1.58 million barrels a day of crude in 2025 and roughly 1.57 million of it toward one buyer. No one can watch the paperwork change — but the U.S. government's own report, and an unreconciled gap between two countries' trade ledgers, are consistent with how it would.
Cross-joining two data sets no single-country desk pairs — SIPRI's military-expenditure series and the WHO's government-health series, both as a share of GDP, both for 2023 — 46 of the 148 economies with figures in both spent more on arms than the state put into health. The list runs 25 of 44 sub-Saharan African economies, 9 of 16 in the Middle East–North Africa–AfPak grouping, and 3 of 4 in South Asia, but zero of the 23 in the Americas.
The UN's own estimates put under-5 mortality down 51% from 2000 to 2024 but neonatal mortality down only 43%, so the newborn share of under-5 deaths rose from 39.5% to 46.0% worldwide — and 9 countries have already cleared the Sustainable Development Goals' headline child-survival target while still missing its separate neonatal one, against just 2 the other way.
In 2015 more than 160 governments adopted a benchmark to spend at least 4% of GDP and/or 15% of the public budget on education. On the latest reported figures, 86 of 190 economies fall below the GDP floor and 125 of 189 below the budget floor; of the 186 that report both, only 46 clear both and 67 clear neither. The two floors disagree about who is passing for 73 countries — and the disagreement tracks income: 49 of the 55 that clear only the GDP floor are upper-middle- or high-income, while the budget-share floor is the only door many poorer states pass through. The United States clears the pledge on GDP and misses it on budget; Viet Nam does the reverse.
Europe shut the refining loophole that let Russian-crude diesel reach its pumps — on 21 January 2026, weeks before a Gulf war pulled the same fuel out of the world's supply. Two shocks, one product, and a cost that lands hardest on those who cannot switch fuels.
China says it bought billions of kilograms of crude 'from Malaysia' — several times more than Malaysia sells to the entire planet. The missing origin is printed, free, in the UN's own database. You do not need a spy. You need a calculator.
Qatar was only 6.6% of the EU's LNG imports when the Strait of Hormuz shut in one-fifth of the world's LNG supply — yet European gas and power still peaked at close to double their pre-war levels. The molecules never came; the price did.
The WHO's expenditure database, built from each state's own books, puts South Africa alone above the Abuja Declaration's 15% line at 16.89%; Namibia misses it by 0.01 of a point, 45 of 54 African Union members spend under 10%, and the median member devotes 6.05% — under half the share it pledged.
The World Bank's own ledger shows $856.6bn in personal remittances received in 2024 against $619.3bn paid — a 1.38-to-1 mismatch that runs the opposite direction from transfer fees, and has held every year since 2018 for a cumulative $1.5tn no country reports sending.
On the World Bank's 2023 series, 117 of 217 economies reported fewer than 2.1 births per woman, up from 98 a decade earlier and 80 in 2000. Among the 19 that fell below the benchmark since 2013 is India (2.40 to 1.98), the world's most populous country. The last region still overwhelmingly above the line is sub-Saharan Africa — 46 of its 48 economies.
In 2014, the year of the Wales pledge, 3 NATO members spent 2% of GDP on defence. On SIPRI's measure as compiled by the World Bank, 17 did in 2024 — with Poland (4.15%) now outspending the United States (3.42%) as a share of its economy, and Latvia, Poland and Lithuania — all bordering Russia or Belarus — posting the alliance's largest decade-long increases.