Sources and methodology

Every statistical series has a reference date and a defined coverage. Publication and retrieval dates do not change the year an observation describes.

Population

Our country factsheets use the medium-variant projection for 1 July 2026 from UN World Population Prospects 2024, revision 1, retrieved 24 September 2026. These are model-based projections, not census counts. National statistical offices can publish different figures because of their methods, coverage and reference dates.

The global total is 8,300,678,395. Summing our 196 country profiles gives 8,282,788,789; the difference reflects areas outside our country directory. The homepage uses the global total. Continent cards sum the profiles in each browsing region and are not the UN regional totals.

GDP and GDP per capita

We use 2024 observations from the World Bank, retrieved 2026-09-27: GDP in current US dollars and GDP per capita in current US dollars. Both are nominal measures, not adjusted for purchasing power.

187 of our 196 country profiles have a GDP observation for this year. Missing observations are omitted from rankings and shown as “—” in comparisons; they do not mean zero. GDP per capita comes directly from the source's matching-year series, rather than dividing older GDP by our 2026 population projection. GDP measures annual output, not personal wealth.

Tourism

The tourism comparison uses the 2024 column of OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2026, Table 1.2, retrieved 2026-09-27. It covers the OECD and partner countries in that table, not all countries worldwide. Rankings describe only the included observations.

Tourists exclude same-day visitors. Visitor counts include them and appear in a separate table. Some countries report arrivals at accommodation establishments rather than at borders; these are labelled in the table. Repeat trips count as repeat arrivals, not unique people. France's value is the estimate in Table 1.2; the report's narrative cites a different UN Tourism estimate, so we retain the table's consistent series.

Research rankings and country guides

The rankings directory links to detailed methodology on each new guide. The poorest-country comparison uses a World Bank snapshot retrieved 1 October 2026, including nominal and PPP GDP per capita for 2024. Density uses matching 2023 population and land-area observations. Both the smallest- and largest-country rankings use that same land-area series plus Vatican City’s official 0.44 km² geography figure. Total area including inland water would produce a different order.

Life expectancy uses World Bank 2024 observations and 2000–2024 historical series. Cost of living uses the internally consistent 2021 ICP price-level benchmark, published in May 2024, with each expenditure category rebased to United States = 100. It is not a current-price or personal-budget forecast. These statistical pages provide the full displayed data as CSV.

Language guides distinguish legal status from actual use and dated speaker estimates. The French guide checks working-language designations against the constitutions or charters of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. The flag guides preserve image proportions and explain variants rather than classifying every image pixel as a design color. Each page links its supporting references and identifies its coverage.

Country profiles: people, economy, development and climate

The “in numbers” section of each profile uses World Development Indicators (CC BY 4.0), retrieved 2026-10-10: urbanisation, age structure, fertility, population growth, infant mortality, real GDP growth, consumer-price inflation, ILO-modelled unemployment, sector shares of GDP, internet use, access to electricity and forest area. Each value is the most recent observation from 2015 onward and is shown with its own year, so years can differ between indicators and countries. “World median” is the middle value among the countries that report the same indicator. The population chart uses the World Bank’s total-population series from 1960, which can differ slightly from the UN projection in the key facts.

The Human Development Index comes from the UNDP Human Development Report 2025 (2023 values and ranks among 193 countries). UNDP publishes no HDI for Monaco, North Korea, Taiwan or Vatican City, so none is shown. This replaces the earlier undated HDI values.

Climate charts show 1991–2020 monthly averages of temperature and precipitation from the World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal (CRU TS 4.08, CC BY 4.0). They are averages over each country’s whole land area, not readings from a single weather station, so the capital, the coast and high ground can differ considerably. Descriptions such as “rainy season” are generated from these averages with fixed rules.

Sunrise and sunset tables on the local-time pages are calculated from capital-city coordinates (Wikidata, CC0, retrieved 2026-10-10) with the standard solar-position formulas used by NOAA, for a sea-level horizon; they are accurate to about a minute. Clock-change dates come from the IANA time zone database bundled at build time.

Country coverage and geography

Our directory covers 193 UN member states, the Holy See (Vatican City), Palestine and Taiwan. These 196 profiles are a browsing convention, not a statement that all have identical international recognition. The five browsing regions combine North and South America as the Americas; Antarctica has no country profiles. Transcontinental countries are assigned to one region for navigation.

Maps use Natural Earth boundaries and credited Wikimedia Commons maps. Interactive maps request OpenStreetMap tiles. Boundary detail and political status can differ between datasets; the country finder is a geographic reference, not a determination of legal jurisdiction.

Tectonic plates

The tectonic plates map uses Peter Bird’s PB2002 model (G³ 2003; GIS edition by Hugo Ahlenius, Open Data Commons Attribution licence) for its 52 plates, 13 orogens and 5,819 classified boundary steps, and the NNR-MORVEL56 angular velocities of Argus, Gordon and DeMets (G³ 2011) for plate motion, in the no-net-rotation frame. Earthquakes are every M6+ event from 1900 to 2025 in the USGS ANSS Comprehensive Catalog (public domain); the catalogue is complete for M6+ only from about 1973, which is the period used for percentages. Volcanoes are the Holocene list of the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program. Countries’ shares of each plate are computed by intersecting Natural Earth 1:10m outlines with the plate polygons. The optional live-earthquake layer is fetched from the USGS by your browser only when you select it, and the seafloor-relief base map is NASA Blue Marble imagery served by GIBS.

Article reviews and other facts

Article sources and review notes identify the claims checked and the date of that check. A review note does not certify all historical or descriptive prose. Other editorial facts without a cited reference date should be checked with an authoritative source before relying on them.

If you find an error, send a correction with the page URL and a source. We update the affected fact and its review note rather than automatically refreshing dates across the site.