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Explore the full data for other cities in our interactive chart: ourworldindata.org//grapher/pop...

Of course, these rely on projections — often many decades ahead — and those come with a lot of uncertainty. Nonetheless, they provide a useful perspective on what the future of cities across the world might look like. (Data Insight written by @eortizospina.bsky.social & @hannahritchie.bsky.social)

In this dataset from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, only 24 of today’s 100 largest cities are projected to still be growing by 2100; of those, 12 are in Africa, and 5 are in South Asia.

Luanda, the capital of Angola, is an interesting case. It gets much less attention than well-established megacities, but as the chart shows, it's on track to overtake São Paulo in about 20 years and Shanghai in about 60.

São Paulo is near its population peak, and Shanghai is projected to peak around 2050. The fastest-growing megacities are now emerging elsewhere. In the chart, you can see various examples: Karachi in South Asia, and Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, and Luanda in Africa.

Most of the world’s fastest-growing megacities will soon be in Africa— Many cities across East Asia and Latin America have grown quickly over the last few decades. Since 1950, São Paulo’s population has grown sixfold. Shanghai’s nearly tenfold. This rapid growth is now ending.

Explore this and all our other data and charts on economic inequality in our new topic page: ourworldindata.org/economic-ine... Let us know what you think — this is just the start, and we’re going to be adding more to this page soon!

We see that in the United States, there’s a 7-fold gap between the incomes of the poorest and the richest 10%. But even the poorest 10% in the US live on much more than the "rich" in a poor country like Madagascar.

The World Bank data, for example, is a crucial source that allows us to compare income inequalities both within and between countries around the world. In the chart we show this for a selection of countries.

It covers three key international datasets, each offering a different perspective: the World Inequality Database, the Luxembourg Income Study, and the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform.

But the wide range of sources and metrics can be hard to navigate. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they cover many different definitions of inequality. We’ve just published a new topic page on economic inequality to help make the data easier to understand.

We have a new Economic Inequality topic page— Public attention to economic inequality has grown a lot over the last twenty years. At the same time, the available data has greatly improved too: it now covers many more countries and longer time periods, and is more comparable and accessible than ever

Our colleague @lcsrg.me recently updated our charts with the latest release, HYDE 3.5, which extends the data to 2025. Explore the updated data in our interactive charts: ourworldindata.org/search?datas...

Because it stretches so far into the past, its earliest figures are necessarily modeled reconstructions rather than direct measurements, so the uncertainty grows the further back in time you look.

It’s built and maintained by researchers in the Netherlands, at the government’s Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) and Utrecht University. The dataset covers 213 countries and regions and reaches back to 10,000 BCE.

This insight comes from the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), the primary window we have into humanity’s land use and population over the very long run.

For most of that history, agriculture used little land from a global perspective. Today, cropland and grazing land together cover around 4.8 billion hectares — almost half of the world’s habitable land. Built-up area is comparatively tiny, at 86 million hectares. You can see this in the chart.

How have humans reshaped the world’s land over the last 12,000 years? Over thousands of years, humans have gradually transformed the Earth’s surface — clearing land for agriculture (crops and grazing animals) and building settlements.

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And given that most eggs in the UK are now free-range, it’s possible to reduce this pain even further. (This Data Insight was written by @hannahritchie.bsky.social and @pablorosado.com.) Read Hannah’s article on what the conditions of hens look like under caged versus cage-free systems: