How the World Population Changed During the 21st Century

The information used for this visualization is openly available through World Bank's data hub. The set aggregates population counts and estimates from governmental census offices. After excluding entries with missing values and those with a 2010 population below 10M I ended up with complete timeseries for 76 countries. More details about the data cleaning and transformation can be found in this Python Notebook.

How to read it: Each line of the graph represents the change in a country's population since 2000. The line thicknes depicts the population value within the individual years. The dropdown selection highlights countries that share the same income group.

To avoid label overlap for crowded slections, they were positioned with D3-Labeler a plug-in that uses simulated annealing for automatic placement.

Interesting Observations

The fastest growing population can be found in Niger that almost doubled over the last 18 years. On the other side of the spectrum, Romania lost almost 15% of its residents. The chart clearly shows the overall trend - the world population is growing fast. Browsing through the income categories indicates negative correlation between wealth and population growth: