This visualization shows the differences in GDP per capita in current USD between a country and the countries which it neighbors to. This visualization only works on desktop I’m afraid.

We can think of the redder a country is, the lower relative GDP the country is in comparison to it’s neighboring countries.

Example: Yemen had a GDP of 660 USD per capita in 2016, and is neighboring to Djibouti which had a GDP of 1872 USD per capita, Saudi Arabia which had 19982, and Oman which had 15102. As the relative difference of Yemen to these countries is fairly high, it’s marked in a red color.

To find how red a country should be, we calculate the relative difference \(rd\) between a country \(country\) and a neighbor \(neighbor\). This is done through the following:

$$ rd(country,neighbor) = \frac{\lvert country - neighbor \rvert}{country} $$

In order to find the relative difference of a country and its \(n\) neighboring countries \(neighbors\), we calculate it through:

$$ country_{rd} = \frac{\sum\limits_{i=1}^{n} {rd(country, neighbors_i)}}{n} $$

This unitless factor is used as the decider for how red a country is.