Methodology

Data sources

World Bank

Core country indicators: GDP, GDP per capita, GDP growth, population, life expectancy, inflation, unemployment, CO₂. 200+ countries, 1960–2024.

IMF WEO

Near-term projections (2024–2027) for GDP, inflation, unemployment, and population.

IMF, BIS, Eurostat, national treasuries

Components of the public debt leaderboard: central government debt, SOE debt, pension liabilities, external-vs-domestic split, and country-level methodology notes.

BEA

US state GDP and GDP per capita (current USD) for 50 states plus DC.

S&P, Moody's, Fitch

Sovereign credit ratings.

Correlates of War

Territorial transfer events 1816–2014, extended with national archive records to cover 221 BC–2025.

Yahoo Finance

22 global stock indices and spot prices for BTC, gold, and silver.

Update cadence

Market quotes

Every 4 hours.

Stock historical series

Daily.

World Bank indicators

Daily refresh; WB revises on a rolling schedule.

IMF WEO

Weekly check; IMF publishes in April and October.

Public debt

Weekly for country-level sources; quarterly for consolidated views.

Credit ratings

Weekly.

BEA state GDP

Quarterly.

Territory

On publication; no scheduled cadence.

Projections

Values for years not yet published as actuals by the World Bank are sourced from the IMF World Economic Outlook. Projection rows are marked est. in the value column, and labeled IMF WEO in the source column.

Public debt — view modes

The public debt leaderboard offers six views over a common table of debt components:

Central Government

Central/federal debt only.

General Government

Central + state/local + social security. IMF GFS definition; matches IMF WEO headline.

Government + SOE

General government plus state-owned enterprises, development banks, and GSEs. Default view.

Total Debt

General government + SOE + corporate + household. BIS-comparable.

Full + Pensions

Total plus unfunded pension liabilities.

Custom

User-selected categories.

The external-share badge on each row, where available, is the percentage of central government debt held by foreign creditors, sourced from IMF Article IV reports, Eurostat, or the national central bank.

US states

US states are identified by ISO 3166-2 codes (US-CA, US-TX). State GDP and per-capita values are from the Bureau of Economic Analysis in current USD.

To keep state figures methodologically comparable with country figures, the per-capita leaderboard pairs BEA state data with IMF WEO country projections (also current USD). The default World Bank per-capita series is in constant 2015 USD, which is not comparable to BEA without adjustment.

Coverage is GDP and GDP per capita. Other indicators (population, unemployment, life expectancy, public debt) are country-only at this time.

Territory

Event types: conquest, cession, secession, independence, unification, annexation, purchase. Independence is recorded as a loss for the ceding state and a gain for the newly independent state.

For any selected time window, the start and end area of each country are reconciled so that start + gained − lost = end. Synthetic pre-window baseline events establish the starting area; they are excluded from the Gained/Lost columns so individual events are not double-counted.

Markets

Returns (YTD, 1-year, 5-year, 10-year) are computed from weekly close prices. When the exact reference date is a market holiday or weekend, the closest trading day within 30 days is used.

Coverage and missing data

Countries that have not reported a given indicator are omitted from that leaderboard. Values are not imputed. Rankings are computed over reporting countries only.

Corrections

Email corrections@statsafari.com with the URL and the value you believe is wrong. Include the source if you have it.