Alexandre Afonso

  The graph above charts popular perceptions about how much immigrants pay into the welfare state (vertical axis) against what they actually pay (horizontal axis, in euros per household). The data comes from a paper by Huber et al. for the horizontal axis (based on EU SILC data) and the the vertical axis comes from the…

Economists often compare the European Union and the United States, notably in the context of macro-economic management. For instance, the United States has a fiscal union that allows automatic transfers from richer states to poorer states, a system that the European Union does not have. The United States also has a more integrated labour market, and…

I have made the graph below with the data from the Panama papers made available two days ago. The original dataset was composed of entities, officers and intermediaries, and the links “subsidiary of”, etc. In order to make the network manageable (there were about 600’000 nodes), I have merged the nodes (entities, officers and intermediaries) by country. The…

Branko Milanovic has a piece in the FT (gated) where he advocates a form of differentiated citizenship as a way to make immigration more acceptable in rich countries. Milanovic argues that immigration is one of the most powerful mechanisms to reduce global income inequalities (by allowing inhabitants of poor countries to increase their income by moving to…

This map (large version can be accessed by clicking below) was made again using the Global Terrorism Database and Plotly, mapping terrorist attacks by the number of casualties until 2014 (before Paris and Brussels). The size of the bubbles corresponds to the number of people killed. Even if terrorist attacks in Europe of course leave a…

The global terrorism database at the university of Maryland has geocodes for all terrorist attacks around the world since 1970. Using plotly, the maps below show the location of terrorist attacks across decades; the size of the bubble indicate the number of people killed. A few remarks: the 1980s were by far the worst in…

The Graph below shows all (I think) EU-related referendums held in EU countries, Norway and Switzerland since 1972. The data comes from various sources, notably a freedom of information request submitted to the Danish government and the Swiss statistical office. After I made the graph, I found that Qvortrup has a nice table as well,…

The graph above shows the evolution of the homicide rate with firearms in the United States (Source; right axis) and data on gun ownership based on the general social survey (source; left axis). I have adjusted the axes. The correlation is quite striking, but of course as always the causality relationship is unclear. On the…

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 35,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many…