What changed in twenty years

The countries that gained a decade of life

Life expectancy rose in 191 of 195 countries. That is the least surprising sentence here. What is surprising is where the gains landed: the top of the table is southern Africa, and the size of the movement, fifteen to twenty years, is larger than anything Europe or North America managed in the same period. This is the antiretroviral era rendered as a number. Eswatini in 2005 was a country where the average person did not reach 45.

Four countries went the other way, and the declines are small, under a year each. Stagnation, not collapse.

The internet stopped being a rich-country thing

The world went from 17.2% online to 73.6%. Underneath that average is the actual event: 110 countries crossed the halfway mark during the window, against 31 that were already there when it opened. The steepest climbs are not in Europe: they are in Central Asia and the Gulf, where connectivity arrived a decade later and then arrived all at once. Kazakhstan went from 3.27% to 93.39%.

39 countries are still below half. Not zero, and worth remembering before assuming a global audience is reachable online.

Electrification is the quiet achievement

Access to electricity rose in 149 countries and fell in 2; 44 were already at or near universal coverage and stayed there. The movers list is the part nobody reports: Cambodia went from a fifth of its population connected to essentially all of it.

The birth-rate story is not the one you have heard

Births per woman fell in 164 of 195 countries. The coverage of this usually focuses on Japan, Italy and South Korea, but the largest declines by far are in countries that were having five or six children per woman twenty years ago and are now closer to three or four. Timor-Leste fell by three whole births per woman. Meanwhile the number of countries at or below the replacement rate of 2.1 went from 79 to 103.

The best number of the twenty years

Infant mortality fell from 44.1 to 27.7 per 1,000 births worldwide, and it fell in 180 of 192 countries. Sierra Leone halved it. If a single line on this page deserves to be famous, it is this one; nothing else humanity measures moved this far in the right direction.

Emissions did not fall. They moved.

World CO2 per person barely changed: 4.39 to 4.69 tonnes. That flat line is two opposite stories cancelling out. The United States dropped from 19.9 to 13.6 tonnes per person; China rose from 4.8 to 9.3. Per person, the biggest cuts belong to rich, high-emission countries and the biggest rises to industrialising ones, which is what a factory moving looks like in the data.

Who overtook whom

Twenty years is long enough for economic orderings people treat as permanent to flip. These crossings are verified against the full World Bank series: the overtake held every year since it happened, and the current gap is wide enough that a routine data revision cannot undo it.

• Singapore overtook United Arab Emirates in 2015compare →
• Ireland overtook United Kingdom in 1998compare →
• Qatar overtook United Arab Emirates in 2001compare →
• Ireland overtook United States in 2015compare →
• United States overtook United Arab Emirates in 2021compare →
• Norway overtook Sweden in 1993compare →

GDP per capita, purchasing-power adjusted. Each link opens the full side-by-side comparison.

Forests: a slow leak, not a collapse

World forest cover slipped from 32.18% to 31.1% of land, and the country count is nearly even: 76 gained cover, 80 lost it. The sharpest contrast sits on one border. Vietnam added 7 points of forest while Cambodia lost 18, over the same years, under the same climate. Policy, not geography.

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