World Stats Map
One map, many layers.
147 of the world's 203 countries and territories drive on the right and 55 drive on the left, with 1 having no recorded convention. Left-hand driving is far from rare: it covers about 27% of countries, including India, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia and most of southern Africa. On the health layer, life expectancy at birth spans 86.5 years in Monaco against 54.64 in Nigeria as of 2024, a gap of 31.9 years across 198 countries. Power sockets are the messiest layer of all: 107 countries use 2 different plug types rather than one.
World Development Indicators, The World Bank (CC BY 4.0). Country facts: mledoze/countries (ODbL). Plug types: Wikidata (CC0). Map: Natural Earth via world-atlas.
About this visualization
About this data
World Bank layers color countries into five quantile bins of the latest available value; tooltips show the exact figure and its reference year. The World Bank does not cover every territory (Taiwan, Western Sahara, and a few others render as no data).
The everyday-conventions layers show which side of the road each country drives on, its international calling-code zone, and how many power plug types are in use (hover for the exact types). Date-format conventions were left out entirely: no cleanly licensed source exists, so rather than guess, the field ships empty (see DATA_GAPS.md).
On the life expectancy layer, the choropleth is verified World Bank data while the five Blue Zone pins are a curated popular claim, deliberately kept separate from the verified layer; no centenarian statistics are shown because none were verifiable from open sources.
Common questions
- What can the world map show?
- Switchable layers covering population, GDP, GDP per capita, life expectancy, internet use, driving side, calling-code zones, and power plug types. The selected layer is stored in the URL, so any view can be linked or shared directly.
- Where does the data come from?
- Development indicators come from World Bank Open Data with the reference year shown for each value. Conventions such as driving side and plug type come from the openly licensed mledoze/countries dataset. Map shapes are Natural Earth.
- Why are some countries left uncolored on a layer?
- Because no value is published for that country on that indicator. Missing data is drawn as unfilled land rather than being interpolated from neighbors, so gaps in the sources stay visible instead of being papered over.
- How many countries drive on the left?
- 55 of 203 countries and territories drive on the left, against 147 on the right, with 1 having no recorded convention. The left-hand group includes India, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and much of southern and eastern Africa, so it accounts for a substantially larger share of the world's population than of its countries.