In the visualization below, each of the OECD is listed with a corresponding line graph. This line graph shows how that particular country’s Debt to GDP Ratio has changed form 1995 to 2020. This visualization was composed with the help of Flourish.
The visualization below uses the same data as the previous three visualizations. This data was acquired from the OECD’s data website by searching “government debt” and selecting the “General government debt” option, which can be accessed at the following link: https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-debt.htm. The main difference between this visualization and the previous one is that in this visualization I decided to use an animated bar chart that shows the Top 10 Debt to GDP Ratios for OECD countries from 1995 to 2020. I used this visualization method because I thought it was important to maintain the change over time information captured in the line graphs in visualization 1 while also putting the provided information in context of one another. With the grid of line graphs in visualization 1, it is difficult to see at first glance how each of the line graphs is related to one another. Therefore, by adding a decreasing vertical bar graph in visualization 2 below, the relative nature of the data is captured. Furthermore, allowing there to be an animated feature to the visualization allows the user to see how the ranking of the top 10 debt to income ratios changes over time.
The last key difference between the first and second visualizations is the additional layer of grouping that was added. I added an additional column for the “region” for each country and also had to re-arrange the original dataset so that the column headers were each of the individual years in the dataset with each row corresponding to a different country. This “region” information was not present in the data provided from the OECD. I felt that this additional information was important to include to provide additional context for the reader. Often, in economic settings, similar geographical regions will experience similar economic trends so I wanted to provide a way for these types of trends to be easily visible in the data. Finally, by grouping the data roughly by continent, it reduced the amount of color that was in the graph. Rather than creating a unique color for each country, I had a unique color for each larger geographic grouping, which simplified the visual information that the viewer needs to digest.
From the visualization below, we can see that, before 2000, most of the top 10 countries’ debt to GDP ratios were steadily increasing. Then, from 2000 to about 2007, there was an overall decline in the debt to GDP ratios for the top 10 countries. The other major trend that can be observed from the visualization below is that, prior to 1999, European and American countries dominated the top three positions in terms of Debt to GDP ratios. Then, in 1999, Japan moved up to the first position in the ranking, staying there until 2020.