Data sources

Population, area, population density, urban population, GDP, GDP per capita, GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, life expectancy, and internet usage all come from the World Bank Open Data API. For each country and indicator, we keep the most recent non-null value reported between 2018 and 2024 — not every country reports every indicator every year, so a figure might be a year or two older for some countries than others.

Not every country reports every indicator — small island nations, micro-states, and a few others are missing figures like inflation or unemployment because the World Bank itself doesn't have them on file.

Each country's official/constitutional name, currency (name, ISO 4217 code, and symbol), and official language(s) come from world-countries, an open, freely-licensed dataset that compiles ISO 4217 currency codes, ISO 639 language codes, the CIA World Factbook, and Wikipedia into one place. We fetch it live and refresh our copy from it directly, rather than keeping our own hand-typed list.

A few of these are inherently unsettled — official names can be politically contested, and currencies occasionally change faster than any dataset can track (Zimbabwe's 2024 currency reform, for one — we patch in a small number of known gaps like this by hand until the upstream dataset catches up). We do our best to keep these current and welcome a correction if you spot one out of date.

Statutory minimum wage figures (in each country's own currency) come from ILOSTAT, the International Labour Organization's statistics database. Coverage years vary by country, so we always show the year a figure was last reported alongside it. A blank figure usually means the country has no statutory minimum wage — pay is set some other way, like collective bargaining (this is the case for Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland, and Austria, among others) — not that the data is missing, though for a handful of small territories ILOSTAT genuinely has no figure on file either way.

The USD figure shown alongside it is a plain currency conversion — the local-currency amount converted using the World Bank's official market exchange rate for that same reporting year. It is not adjusted for purchasing power or cost of living, so it's meant for a quick, literal dollar comparison only — not a claim that two countries' minimum wages buy the same amount of goods.

Country borders and outlines come from world-atlas (110m resolution), a TopoJSON build of Natural Earth's public domain map data. At this resolution, shapes are simplified for smooth rendering rather than surveyed precision — good for a recognizable silhouette, not for cartographic or legal boundary claims.

Which countries have been at war, against/with whom, and in what years comes from the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset, produced by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (Uppsala University) with PRIO Oslo — the standard academic and UN-referenced source for this. It's free and CC BY 4.0 licensed: Gleditsch, Wallensteen, Eriksson, Sollenberg & Strand (2002) "Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A New Dataset", Journal of Peace Research 39(5), plus UCDP's annual "Organized violence" article (see the dataset's own codebook for that year's exact citation).

This is a narrow, deliberate slice of the dataset: only conflicts that reached at least 1,000 battle-related deaths in a calendar year (UCDP's own "war" threshold) are included, and only from 1946 onward — UCDP's own coverage starts at the end of WWII. A country not showing any wars doesn't mean it's never had an armed conflict, only that none crossed this specific threshold. Interstate wars are shown on both countries' pages.

The share of each country's own electricity generation that comes from coal, oil, gas, nuclear, hydropower, wind, solar, bioenergy and other renewables comes from Our World in Data's energy dataset, which combines Ember's Yearly Electricity Data with the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy (the direct successor to the BP Statistical Review). Each country's numbers are a snapshot of its single most recent reported year, not a time series — the year is shown alongside the percentages since it varies a lot by country.

A country missing this section entirely has no data in the source at all (mostly small states/territories without their own standalone electricity grid) — it's a genuine coverage gap, not a claim that the country generates no electricity. Where a country does have data, a real 0% for one fuel is shown as 0%, not left out.

Each of our 365 daily facts is individually researched and cited — every fact card links to its own source (mostly Wikipedia) so you can read further or double-check it yourself.