Our World in Data

All three statements are true at the same time—

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The world is awful.

Many horrible things happen, such as millions of children dying every year.

The world is much better.

As bad as things can be, they are in many ways much better than in the past. The rate of children dying is far lower than ever. We have made real progress.

The world can be much better.

The progress has often been unequal, and many large challenges remain. There is a lot of work left for us to do. Continued progress is possible — we know this because of how much we’ve already achieved.

Tajikistan's remittances are worth nearly half the country’s GDP—

In Tajikistan, remittances — the money sent or brought back by migrants — amounted to 48% of GDP in 2024. The chart places this figure in context by comparing it with other countries with data for the same year.

Nicaragua and Honduras receive remittances worth around a quarter of their GDP — high by global standards, but still far below Tajikistan's level.

Bar chart of remittances (money sent or brought back by migrants) as a share of GDP for countries in 2024 where a few countries receive very large shares — the top country is Tajikistan at 48% of GDP — while most countries receive much smaller shares, many close to 0%. Source: World Bank staff estimates based on IMF and OECD data (2026). License: CC BY.

Remittances here include two types of flows: money migrants abroad send home to their families, and money cross-border workers bring home from short-term jobs abroad.

Both of these flows play a role in Tajikistan, where most remittances come from labor migrants in Russia. In addition to the roughly 400,000 Tajiks settled there, hundreds of thousands more cross the border for seasonal and short-term work.

According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, about 1.2 million Tajiks were in Russia in mid-2024, which is more than a tenth of Tajikistan's total population.

The World Bank's latest Tajikistan Economic Update says that much of the country's recent rapid economic growth (above 8% since 2021) was supported by these remittance inflows.

(This Data Insight was written by

@eortizospina

Explore interactive data on remittances for all countries: ourworldindata.org/great…

The great global redistributor we never hear about: money sent or brought back by migrants

How will populations across the world change in the 21st century?

🔧 Explore for yourself with our new interactive tool!

Demographers publish projections using assumptions about key demographic changes, most notably fertility rates, life expectancy, and migration rates.

But no one knows for sure how many children people will have decades from now, or how migration will shift.

So it’s worth asking what the population would look like if things turn out differently from what the UN or other demographers assume.

Our colleagues Daniel Bachler and Sophia Mersmann built a population simulation tool that lets you do just that — for every country in the world.

Pick a country, adjust the assumptions, and see how the projections change, for both total population and age structure.

Check out the new tool: ourworldindata.org/popul…

Population tool: how will populations across the world change in the 21st century?

In a new article, Hannah Ritchie uses the tool to focus on South Korea, whose population is projected to more than halve by 2100, from 52 million today to just 22 million.

What would it take to stop the decline? And how likely are these different scenarios?

Read Hannah's article: ourworldindata.org/south…

South Korea’s population is set to shrink: what would it take to stop the decline?

China added a Germany-sized electricity grid last year—

(This Data Insight was written by

@hannahritchiedata

and Pablo Rosado.)

We’ll often see headlines quoting how many gigawatts of new solar farms or coal plants China is building. But it’s hard to get a meaningful sense of scale for how electricity generation in China is changing.

The chart puts it in perspective.

In 2025 alone, China’s electricity generation increased by almost 500 terawatt-hours (TWh).

Bar chart of the change in China’s electricity generation from 2024 to 2025 compared to the annual electricity generation of other countries, where China’s 2025 increase is about 497 TWh—mostly from solar (340 TWh) and wind (140 TWh)—roughly the size of Germany’s annual generation and larger than countries like South Africa, Italy, Australia, Spain, and the UK (240 to 290 TWh) but smaller than France (570 TWh) and Brazil (750 TWh). Source: Ember (2026). License: CC BY.

This is compared here to the total amount of electricity that whole countries generate each year.

Germany generates almost exactly that amount. That means China effectively added a Germany-sized grid to its electricity system in just one year.

What’s also quite staggering is that almost all of this new generation came from solar and wind. China generated 340 TWh more electricity from solar than the year before.

That’s more than our two home countries, the UK and Spain, generate from all sources each year.

Low-carbon sources grew so much that coal power in China actually fell slightly.

This data comes from Ember’s latest global electricity review — you can explore more of this data on our site: ourworldindata.org/searc…