Datawatch:
Britons have long been thought of as heavy drinkers, but recently the proportion of binge drinkers has been falling and teetotallers are growing in number. Changes in behaviour among the young are...
View ArticleDatawatch: UK conception rate per thousand women
Since 1990, the proportion of women over 30 has been increasing — the rate for the over 40s has more than doubled. At the same time younger women are much less likely to become pregnant. Teenage...
View ArticleDatawatch: Renewable energy in the EU
The share of the EU’s energy consumption that comes from renewables reach 15 per cent in 2013 compared with 8.3 per cent in 2004. The Eu as a whole has a target to get 20 per cent of its energy from...
View ArticleDatawatch: Aid spending
Development aid flows from some of the world’s biggest donors were roughly equal in 2014 with their all-time high of £135.1bn in 2013, according to the OECD. Bigger economies tend to give the most,...
View ArticleDatawatch: the stock market and general elections
A robust FTSE provides scarce comfort for incumbents. While the boom in 1987 did coincide with Margaret Thatcher’s return to office, the 7.9 per cent growth in 1997 wasn’t enough to save John Major.
View ArticleGeneral election: Game of seats as forecasters disagree on tally
As the UK political system has fragmented, electoral forecasts have taken on new significance. They allow us to crunch bewildering amounts of data and gauge what kind of government will emerge after...
View ArticleInteractive: UK political donations
The Electoral Commission keeps a record of every donation above £7,500 to Britain’s political parties. Although nominally transparent, the records are difficult to use: the only unique identifier for...
View ArticleDatawatch: price of an iPhone 6 around the world
The strengthening of the US dollar has reduced the competitiveness of the US compared to the rest of the world according to an analysis of prices conducted by Deutsche Bank. However it remains the...
View ArticleDatawatch: global search market share
On desktop, Google accounts for the vast majority of all searches while Baidu, a Chinese company, is a distance second. On mobile and tablet, Google’s dominance is even starker, with a market share...
View ArticleCan we rely on measures of extreme poverty?
Due to a mix of scarce resources, methodological difficulties and poor incentives, much of the data collected on the world’s poor is either inaccurate or missing. That’s one of the findings of a study...
View ArticleThe Labour-Conservative marginals are still the ones to watch
The chart below shows the 2010 general election result for every seat in Great Britain with the colour showing the party that won . Dots that are nearer the apex of the triangle had a higher vote...
View ArticleDatawatch: Government borrowing costs
For the past two decades the costs of government borrowing for the UK, US and Germany has been roughly the same. But the Bund yield has diverged recently as the expectation is that rates will rise...
View ArticleDatawatch: the top ten fastest growing economies
According to the latest IMF forecasts, Papua New Guinea is forecast to be the fastest-growing economy in the world in 2015, managing to increase the size of its gross domestic product by about a...
View ArticleDatawatch: Postal voting
Postal votes were introduced after the first world war for former servicemen but were made more widely available in 2001. At the last general election they accounted for nearly a fifth of total votes
View ArticleDatawatch: Apple’s cash pile
The amount of cash and cash equivalents held by Apple has more than quadrupled since 2010, enough to buy Coca-Cola or Disney outright. Amazon, however, is out of reach due to a recent surge in the...
View ArticleDatawatch: global smartphone shipments
According to the latest data from research firm Strategy Analytics, the number of smartphone sales rose by 21 per cent on an annual basis in the first quarter of 2015. Samsung overtook Apple to once...
View ArticleDatawatch: shift in priorities for UK voters since 2010
When the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition took office in 2010 the majority of the public told pollsters that the economy was the most important issue facing the country. As the economy has...
View ArticleDatawatch: UK election seats by declaration time
Most seats in the UK are projected to declare the winner between 2am and 5am in the general election held today. Labour leaning seats, which tend to be in urban areas and have lower turnout, are often...
View ArticleBritain’s general election: why Labour lost
Before Labour tear themselves apart trying to figure out how to proceed from the general election result it’s worth taking a look at how the voters behaved. The data suggests that Labour’s problems are...
View ArticleWho owns Britain’s companies?
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, gave a speech last week lamenting that the liberalising policies adopted by the Thatcher government in the 1980s never led to widespread share ownership: The...
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