📍 First Visualization
This is the original visualization from OECD. Since the number of countries in 2020 is more substantial than in 2021, the data of 2020 is selected for visualization.
📍 Second Visualization
This is the visualization created by Flourish. The sparklines display the trend of debt-to-GDP ratios for 40 countries and OECD since 1995. The majority of countries display an upward trend, with Japan and Greece experiencing the largest growth.
📍 Third Visualization
This is the other visualization created by Flourish, showing the average debt-to-GDP ratio of 5 continents and OECD over the last 5 years. In 2021, Asia’s average debt-to-GDP ratio is the highest over nearly five years, reaching 120.87%.
⭐ Comparison of the three visulizations
The first visualization is a single bar chart from the OECD website. The chart shows the debt-to-GDP ratio of 39 countries in the world in 2020. Because each bar represents a country, we can use the chart to see which countries have the highest and lowest debt-to-GDP ratios in 2020. To compare which countries have ratios that exceed the OECD average, the bars for the OECD average are colored black. Compared with the other two methods, this chart is most suitable for comparing the national data of a certain year. However, the chart contains too much data, and the country names on the x-axis are slanted, making the chart difficult to read.
The second visualization is a grid of line charts. With a line chart, this pair of charts depicts the trend of each country’s debt-to-GDP ratio since 1995. The most recent year of data is represented by the dots on the line charts. However, due to the large number of countries, the audience is unable to visually compare the debt-to-GDP ratio data of different countries. Audiences have to constantly move his/her mouse and eyes while looking at this chart, making it challenging to draw a precise conclusion. This chart, in contrast, is better suited to visually illustrating the shifting trend of the ratio of various countries.
The third visualization is a grid of bar charts. I divide the countries into continents and compute the average debt-to-GDP ratio for the OECD over the previous five years for each continent. The value of a country over a 5-year period is shown by each bar in the grid chart. Over the past five years, we can see that the debt-to-GDP ratio of each continent is relatively average without major fluctuations. Asia’s average debt-to-GDP ratio over the past five years has been found to be the highest by comparing the data sizes of several histograms. At the same time, I tried to use the line chart, but since the data of each continent is not much different, the effect of a line chart is not good. However, the grid of bar charts cannot obtain specific national data or the comparative relationship between countries, in contrast to the first two visualization techniques.