Debt to GDP Ratio for 2015 interactive graph from OECD: Bar Chart
The interactive graph above shows the values of each country’s Debt to GDP ratio in 2015 when hovering the mouse over it.
Debt to GDP Ratio(1995-2018): Beeswarm plot
The beeswarm plot is an alternate way to visualize the Debt to GDP ratio chart. It builds on the bar chart because it shows the values for multiple years for all the countries. The default settings like width, height and max radius have been edited so as to not cause an overlap between the circles. Here each circles’s radius shows the corresponding country’s Debt to GDP ratio.
Debt to GDP Ratio(1995-2018): Area Graph
The area graph above shows the same data as in the beeswarm plot but in a more conscise way. Here the countires are grouped by Continents using the colours. The width of the graph at any point represents the Debt to GDP ratio of the country.
Critique
The bar chart lacks perspective and doesn’t represent the evolution of the Debt to GDP Ratio with time. The beeswarm overcomes this problem but shows a lot of data without any classification or grouping. Also estimating radius or comparing it with others isn’t straightforward in a beeswarm plot.
The area chart groups the countries by continents and offers a much more continuous version for visualization of data. The width at each point represents the Debt to GDP ratio for that country and because of the continuous nature of the graph, it’s easy to compare data points than the above two visualizations. To improve the haphazard ordering of data in the beeswarm plot(circles with small radius are interspersed between those with higher radius), the data has been ordered in ascending order of total value of the ratios for each country. This creates a more visually pleasing and continuous look to the visualization.
Citation
The data used in this page is taken from: OECD Government Debt Data [OECD (2020), General government debt (indicator). doi: 10.1787/a0528cc2-en (Accessed on 26 January 2020)]
Visualization using Tableau
