Ethiopia is ranked 1st. Its ratio of refugees to wealth 572 times higher than Australia's. We're tiny but many other nations are barely visible. Japan, for example, has a ranking of 107 and a ratio 11 times smaller than Australia. The next two panels on the graphic above show Australia's contribution as a share of population and by number. We fare slightly better by these measures, ranking 67th for the number of residents per refugee (Australia has 662 residents per refugee) and 50th for the number of refugees hosted (35,582 or just 0.25 per cent of the global total). This is how we rank when it comes to asylum seekers. In 2014, Australia received less than 9000 asylum applications, or 0.2 per cent of the global total.

The United Nations describes ours as "an age of unprecedented mass displacement". Nearly 60 million people are now forcibly displaced people across the globe, according to the latest UN figures. That's more human beings fleeing conflict and persecution than at any time since World War II. As these maps show, the forcibly displaced have spread to nearly every corner of the globe.

For 33 of the last 36 years, the country taking in the most displaced people has been either Iran or Pakistan. But in 2014, the Syrian conflict turned Turkey into the world's leading host for refugees. More than half of all refugees come from just three countries (Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria), and one in two is a child - the highest proportion in more than a decade. In another record high, 1.7 million individual applications for asylum were submitted last year, only 15 per cent via UN offices. This included more than 34,000 children who were unaccompanied as they fled their homes. Last year, one in five displaced people was Syrian. So massive is the migration of Syrians that they have sought asylum in more than 100 countries.

Compare this with those displaced by Ukraine's civil war. Nearly all of the 274,000 people who applied for asylum from Ukraine in 2014 sought it in one place: Russia, with its strong historical and cultural connections to their homeland. The methods used to compare the contribution of each nation to hosting refugees and asylum seekers are fiercely contested, even among those with similar political views. The UN also compares countries by the ratio of refugees to land size; the Refugee Council of Australia advocates a comparison based on total GDP, rather than GDP per capita.

Australia's contribution can look better or worse, depending not only on the calculations used but also, how asylum seekers and refugees are defined and counted. For example, Australia is often cited as a world leader when it comes to refugee resettlement. This is true. In 2014, it ranked 3rd out of 26 countries for number of resettlement arrivals and 1st when measured as a share of population or GDP. However, the term "resettlement" refers specifically to refugees who have already sought asylum in one country and are later permanently accepted to a third country. Only a tiny fraction of the world's refugees are resettled each year. Resettlement arrivals made up just 3 per cent of refugees recognised and resettled in 2014 and less than 1 per cent (0.7%) of the refugees under the UNHCR's mandate.

Nevertheless, over the past decade, some 900,000 refugees have been resettled. They are excluded from UN refugee counts because they are considered to have found a lasting solution. By contrast, refugees in many developing countries remain refugees until they return home, regardless of whether they have lived there for months or generations. This method of defining and counting refugees partially explains why some developing nations have such large refugee populations: some of these populations have built up over many years. (Proximity is the major driver of refugees and asylum seekers to developing nations, which host 86 per cent of all refugees.)

This graphic, based on an analysis by the Refugee Council of Australia and Fairfax Media, includes refugees who were either recognised or resettled refugees in the past decade. Here, Australia ranks 22nd by number, 27th by population and 43rd by GDP per capita. When it comes to defining and counting asylum seekers, there's a similar quirk to the numbers: sometimes they include only individual asylum applications and ignore group recognition or temporary protection. It's a significant exclusion. Group recognition is used for mass displacements. It presumes every member of that population is a refugee (unless otherwise shown) because the need for protection is usually urgent and it would be impractical to assess each application. In 2014, more than one million asylum seekers entered more than 20 countries - all developing nations - under group recognition. This is about the same number that applied for asylum individually.

A further 1.8 million applied for temporary protection. Two would-be immigrants rest at Maspalomas beach on Spain's Canary Islands. Credit:Reuters A vast expanse of ocean has largely spared Australia from witnessing the desperate march of the forcibly displaced. Nevertheless, our own experience of deaths at sea shows mass movements can quickly spill over into tragedy. In other countries bordering crisis zones, the mass movement of the displaced has become the new "normal", with asylum seekers washing up on beaches at popular holiday resorts or perched atop the soaring wire fences that surround wealthy Europeans playing golf on manicured lawns. Such barriers are part of a growing network. Right now, walls edged with barbed wire are being built or extended on the borders between Egypt and Israel, Serbia and Hungary, Tunisia and Libya, and the US and Mexico.

Where such walls have long existed, the threat of future displacement may be hidden - at least for the time being. North Korea's neighbours, for example, would bear the brunt of a potentially massive human displacement if its repressive regime collapsed. And the recent boats crisis in the Bay of Bengal drew attention to the hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas confined within Myanmar but displaced from their homes. Places such as these may well become the point of departure for tomorrow's forcibly displaced.