Towards effective government

What makes government effective? Is it measured by the happiness level of the citizens, their health, or simply by economic success?

One measure called the Human Development Index(HDI) is calculated yearly by the United Nations based on the health of its citizens along with their level of education and standard of living and provides a standard, regularly tracked metric which can be used to measure the effectiveness of government over time.

Based on their HDI, countries are broadly classified into four categories as low HDI, medium HDI, high HDI and very high HDI.

This visualization aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between HDI scores with various direct as well as indirect factors.
Since HDI is directly affected by health and education of the citizens, spending on health and education have been included as the direct factors, whereas four measures of governance namely, "Political Stability & Absence of Violence", "Government Effectiveness", "Regulatory Quality" and "Rule of Law" have been chosen as the indirect factors.

Using the visualization, we can therefore explore questions such as whether countries with a higher HDI spend more on health and education than their lower HDI counterparts, and whether countries with higher HDI enjoy better governance.

Hover over any country to view details Click any two countries to compare Countries with similar governance scores United States of America The U.S.A spends the highest percentage of GDP on health related expenses amongst all high HDI countries and is second only to Sierra Leone in terms of percentage of GDP spent on health. African Nations The countries with the lowest HDI are all from Africa. African nations constitute over 80% of the nations with low HDI and highlight the need to focus measures to improve governance in the continent. India India is home to the second largest population on the planet and is expected to soon surpass that of China. Any improvement in governance would thus improve the lives of a very large number of people. Venezuela Venezuela is a high HDI country with very low governance indicators which are similar to low HDI countries like Eritrea and Zimbabwe. Venezuela has the lowest score for "Rule of Law" across all nations
Interpreting the visualization
The circular visualization has four outer discs representing four governance indicators, and an inner disc showing the spending on health as well as education as a percentage of the country's GDP.
Best Good Good governance Bad Worst Bad governance Spending on Health % of GDP Spending on Education % of GDP

Each country is represented as a single slice of the circle. Values increase towards the outer edge of each circle and decrease towards the center.

Governance indicator values are on a scale from -2.5 to 2.5. Values progress from 0 to 2.5 in case of good governance and from 0 to -2.5 in case of bad governance. Each bar shown in the visualization represents upto 0.5 points.

Hovering over any section shows the relevant data values for that country slice. Clicking on any two countries shows a comparison of their values.

Data collection & Methodology
All data used is from the year 2015 so as to maintain consistency while ensuring that sufficient data is available. Countries with insufficient or missing data have been excluded from analysis.
To determine countries with similar governance indicators, the mean squared difference between the four governance indicator scores for each pair of countries was calculated and the three countries having the lowest mean squared difference were selected for each reference country. In case the mean squared difference was greater than or equal to 0.2, the country was not considered for inclusion which has resulted in some countries having less than three similar countries in their list.
Data has been collected from the following sources:
http://hdr.undp.org/en/data#
http://apps.who.int/nha/database
http://data.uis.unesco.org/?queryid=181
http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/#home
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017). World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, DVD Edition.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2147.html#al
Final Note

The 56 countries with a very high HDI cover the largest area of land on the planet. However, due to these including some very sparsely populated areas, they have less than a fifth of the world's population. In contrast, the 42 countries with medium HDI cover less than 15% landmass, but house over a third of the population.

Hover over the images on the two sides to see a breakup of landmass and population across the HDI categories.

Landmass distribution
Very high HDI
43.22%
High HDI
27.62%
Medium HDI
14.63%
Low HDI
14.52%
Population distribution
Very high HDI
18.84%
High HDI
32.18%
Medium HDI
36.65%
Low HDI
12.33%
World Data Visualization Prize entry by Abdulqadir Rashik
Spending as % of GDP
Health
Education
HDI
HDI
Rank
Rank
Expenditure as a % of GDP
Health
Health
Education
Education
Governance Indicators
Political stability & absence of violence
Political stability & absence of violence
Government effectiveness
Government effectiveness
Regulatory quality
Regulatory quality
Rule of law
Rule of law