In 2000 South Korea had fewer than half as many researchers per million people as Japan. By 2022 it had almost twice as many, and it leads t...
Global patent filings climbed 173% in two decades, then stopped. The 2018 peak still stands, and the whole of the 2019 decline came from one...
In 2000 Japan filed 387,364 patents to China's 25,346. Twenty-one years later China filed more than five times as many as the United States,...
Most countries bottomed out in 2020. Chinese carriers flew fewer passengers in 2022 than in 2020, and fewer than in any year since 2009.
In 2020 the world flew 60% fewer passengers. Its ports handled 1.5% fewer containers. Two global transport systems, the same shock, and comp...
In 1995 the United States had ten times more people online than any other country. It is now a distant third, and the reason is arithmetic r...
It has finished first in every year since 1960. But the way these figures are usually presented hides more than it shows.
Malaysia produced more natural rubber than almost anyone in 1990. It has since lost about seventy per cent of its output, while Ivory Coast...
Maize is the largest cereal crop on earth by volume, and the majority of it never reaches a human plate. Understanding that explains the ent...
In the cited FAOSTAT snapshot, Ivory Coast and Ghana produced 2.42 million tonnes of cocoa beans in 2024, or 46.3% of the world total.
India passed China in rice production, and it exports more than the next four exporters combined. That combination gives one government unus...
Almost every story about agriculture is a growth story. Wheat is not. US output is down more than a quarter since 1990 and France is down a...