Many of the economic trends that have defined countries’ fortunes over the past year are especially striking when seen visually—how in the U.S., for example, unemployment declined, or how, in Russia, the ruble plummeted. Here are four charts that reveal trends with particularly far-reaching implications for the global economy as a whole:

1. Far more people got online.

Two years ago, the Boston Consulting Group predicted that, by 2016, three billion people would be online; this year, the international Broadband Commission for Digital Development found that we’re likely to reach that milestone much sooner than expected, with an estimated 2.9 billion people online as of the end of this year, up from 2.3 billion, in 2013. This number shouldn’t conjure images of dusty roadside cybercafés filled with beige computer monitors, however; far more people worldwide are accessing the Internet with mobile broadband connections than with fixed ones.

Still, the numbers show that there are great disparities in Internet usage. In countries defined in the Broadband Commission’s report as “developed,” it is estimated that Internet penetration will have reached seventy-eight per cent by the end of the year. In “developing” countries, it will have reached thirty-two per cent; there, people are increasingly using handheld devices to do things like pay bills and keep track of their health, which is especially helpful in rural areas, where banks and clinics might not be accessible. In the “least developed countries,” as denoted by the report, Internet penetration remains under ten per cent.

[caption id="attachment_2916241" align="alignright" width="320"][#image: /photos/59096053c14b3c606c105be6]

More of the year in review.

[/caption]

In 2013, Facebook partnered with six other tech companies for an initiative, called Internet.org, that was designed to help get more people online faster. They framed it as a philanthropic effort—which it was, in part—but it was also self-serving, insofar as the more people who are online, the more people there are to use their services. Even Bill Gates seemed skeptical, telling the Financial Times, “Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that’s great. I don’t.”

Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, has generally avoided framing Internet.org as a vehicle for his company to make more money, but in December, he acknowledged to Time magazine, “There are good examples of companies—Coca-Cola is one—that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come. I do think something like that is likely to be true here. So even though there’s no clear path that we can see to where this is going to be a very profitable thing for us, I generally think if you do good things for people in the world, that that comes back and you benefit from it over time.”

With more people coming online, governments, too, are taking notice of the new tools available to their citizens. They have, as I have written previously for this site, been gradually cracking down on their citizens’ Internet freedom—using sophisticated technology to block access to certain content, and even arresting or physically harming people whose communications are deemed inappropriate. The Internet is a powerful medium; it’s inevitable that as more people gain access to the Web, those already in power, including corporations and governments, will want to use it to consolidate their control.

2. The price of oil plummeted.

West Texas Intermediate is the name of a light, sweet oil that buyers and sellers around the world often use as a benchmark for oil pricing. From June to December, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate fell more than forty per cent, from more than a hundred dollars to less than sixty. Shifts in oil prices might seem academic, but their ramifications for the world economy and geopolitics are enormous, because we still rely on oil to power pretty much everything we do.

There are a couple of key reasons for the decline in oil prices, having to do with both supply and demand. On the supply side, fracking and other techniques have made huge amounts of North American oil newly available, while Libya and Iraq, which had been exporting less oil because of their civil turmoil, started increasing output again. On the demand side, economic troubles in China and parts of Europe had people and companies using less oil. Generally speaking, the lower oil prices have been good for countries that import more oil than they export—like the U.S., where it has translated into lower gas-pump prices and cheaper transportation for businesses—and bad for those that export more.

Further complicating matters, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as OPEC, decided in late November not to reduce its production quotas, which would have had the effect of lowering over-all supply and driving prices up. It appears that one of OPEC’s targets is U.S. producers of the shale oil that comes from methods like fracking (the U.S. doesn’t belong to OPEC); it’s expensive to extract oil using the new methods, and low oil prices could eventually make it prohibitively costly—thus helping the OPEC oil producers in the long run.