World Health Organization (WHO): spotting spending patterns in 2000-2015

It took me a while to find and groom WHO spending numbers. All financial reports I used can be found here. There were a few challenges, here are some worth mentioning.

1. Between 2000 and 2011, the WHO published two-year financial reports, and in 2012, they switched to one-year schedule.

2. The list of expenditure categories was changing from year two year. As a result, I could not break down equipment and supplies category into meaningful groups, so medical supplies and furniture fall into the same category. Same with the "Other" category: it includes grants, research contracts, local subsidies and what not.

3. Since 2008, WHO financial reports stopped providing staff costs breakdown, so "Stuff costs" category includes full-time and part-time employees, consultants and even governing body delegates.


Below is the two-axis chart that shows absolute spending numbers as bars and the share of some spending categories as lines:



Key observations:

• the WHO is drifting towards outsourcing some of the activities: watch the staff+equipment spending go down while contractual services going up;
• the share of travel expenses grew three times between 2000 and 2015.

It turned out both observations make sense: just google "world health organization outsourcing" and "world health organization travel expenses".

Animated GIF is alive and well

I have just came across a blog featuring high-quality charts visualizing all kinds of data: https://datasoaring.blogspot.com. Charts are made with plot.ly, highcharts, bokeh, charte.ca and other tools. Some charts are published as high-quality animated GIFs. Apparently, the blogger uses this data format as a last resort - not so many tools out there support animation right out of the box. Anyways, good to see charte.ca in a good company.

Log scale for XY charts

From now on, charte.ca supports log scale in all XY charts (bubble, scatter, motion). Consider the following visualization of World Bank and SIPRI Military Expenditure Database data:

Why log scale? There are a few cases when a log scale is appropriate. The most well known is: log scales allow a large range to be displayed without small values being compressed down into bottom of the graph. Consider the same visualization made using linear scale (this is just a screenshot, not an interactive chart, but it gives you a good idea about the problem):

More fun with motion charts: European top 20 imports and exports, 1990-2016

World Bank Group provides a lot of data to play with. Let's build a motion chart based on export, import, and GDP data for European top 20 economies, grouped by regions - Northern, Western, Eastern, and Southern.

Watch international trade shrinking between 2008 and 2009!