Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
The map above shows that Russia’s nominal GDP (according to the IMF) in 2025 $2.2 Trillion. This makes it the world’s 11th largest.
Or put another way, it is roughly the same as the GDP of Spain ($1.8 Trillion), Portugal ($320 Billion) and Andorra ($4 Billion) put together.
However, Russia has 146 million people compared to a combined 60 million in Spain (49 million), Portugal (10.6 million) and Andorra (87k).
And the map below shows how many Russia sized economies there are in Europe:
In 1990, China was the world’s 11th largest economy in nominal GDP terms at $397 Billion USD.
And when using $PPP dollars (which is an attempt to better reflect the cost of living in a country) it was still only the world’s 7th largest economy at $992 Billion.
Yet by 2025 it has become the second largest to the United States in nominal GDP terms at $20 Trillion USD and the largest in $PPP terms at $40 Trillion.
The maps below show’s China’s nominal GDP relative to the 10 economies that were larger than it was in nominal GDP terms in 1990 (plus Australia).
They show the difference in size between them in 1990, the year they roughly become equal, and finally the difference in size in 2025. Full data is at the bottom of the page.
The maps below build up the world based on the share of the population who are immigrants.
The map above shows whether your country has more immigrants (people born abroad who live there now) or emigrants (people born in the country but now living in another one).
The data is for 2024 and comes from the United Nations International Migrant Stock report.
On the surface the map is what you’d expect, North America, Australia, Western Europe and the Gulf States have more immigrants than emigrants.
However, there some surprising things.
For example, North Korea has more immigrants than emigrants, while the much richer South Korea is the opposite. Although it should be noted that the South Korea’s absolute numbers of each are much larger than the North.
Also, Portugal is the lone exception in Western Europe to have more emigrants than immigrants.
Some more findings and full data below:
The map above shows what the world would look like if you removed all countries in the world with over 50 million people.
The remaining countries would have a combined population of just 1.8 billion, a decline of 75% from the over 8 billion who are alive today.
But the earth would only lose 67,569,201 sq km (26,088,614 sq miles) of land or around 45% of the earth’s total land area.
Spain becomes the world’s most populous country with 49,077,984 people. And Canada would become the world’s largest country by area and 7th most populous.
Full list of the 30 countries removed (with population figures) and a few other observations:
The map above shows how many former European overseas colonies of each country are now part of a country with a larger GDP than the original coloniser.
GDP figures come from the IMF and are in nominal terms at 2025 exchange rates.
For example, the US, India and China (via Hong Kong and other concessions) all have larger GDPs than the UK. That said, I’ve actually made a mistake and the UK should actually be 4, not 3 (see below).
You can see the full list below with an example where not obvious:
The map above shows a brief comparison between the Soviet Union in 1990 and Russia in 2025.
The GDP numbers for 1990 come from the 1990 edition of the CIA World Factbook, which noted that:
The map above shows one history’s forgotten economic geography facts. Today we tend to think of South Korea as a economic miracle and North Korea as an economic basket case.
However, from the division of the Korean peninsula in 1948 up until the early 1970s, the North was actually richer than the South in per capita terms.
The maps below compare GDP growth of various countries between 2000 and 2025. The GDP data comes from the IMF via Wikipedia which states that:
“Figures are based on official exchange rates, not on the purchasing power parity (PPP) methodology. Values are given in millions of United States dollars (USD) and have not been adjusted for inflation.”
In total World GDP increased from $34 Trillion USD to $116 Trillion USD during this period a 240% increase!
The map above shows the huge difference in the size of the UK vs Japan’s highspeed rail networks in 1963 compared to 2025.
Given the UK’s invented passenger railways it seems even more strange. So why is the UK network’s so small compared to Japan’s?