Country comparison: put any two countries side by side
Pick two countries and this tool lines up their population, land area, GDP, GDP per capita, life expectancy, urban share, internet use and military spending in one table, with the reference year printed on every single figure.
By Team Geography··Last reviewed
Compare two countries
196 places, 8 indicators, every figure dated
Type a name or an ISO code such as JP. Taiwan is included, with its sources named separately.
Quick pairs
Two countries compared across eight indicators, with the reference year for each figure
How to read a country comparison
Two countries are never different in one way only. A country with ten times the population of its neighbour usually has a larger economy and a smaller economy per person, a younger population and a lower internet share, and every one of those facts is part of the same story. Reading the rows together, rather than hunting for a winner in one of them, is the whole point of putting them next to each other.
The comparison that started this tool is Norway and Saudi Arabia, two oil states of similar output and completely different shape, which is why they load by default. Taiwan and China have enough going on to need a page of their own: that one lives at Taiwan vs China.
What the eight indicators measure
GDP is the size of an economy in current US dollars, so it tracks population as much as prosperity: India's economy is far larger than Denmark's and an Indian household is far poorer than a Danish one. GDP per capita divides that total by the people in it and is the closer proxy for a standard of living, though it is an average and says nothing about how the money is distributed.
Land area excludes inland water, which is why the figure here is smaller than the total surface area an atlas will quote for the same country. Urban share is the percentage living in places a national statistics office counts as urban, and those definitions differ by country. Military spending is expressed as a share of GDP rather than in dollars, so a small rich state and a large poor one can be read on the same scale.
Where the numbers come from
Seven of the eight rows are World Bank World Development Indicators, pulled from the Indicators API and cited under the table with their indicator codes. The military row is the World Bank's redistribution of the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database. Every value carries the newest year that country actually reported, so two cells in one row can be a year or two apart, and the table says so rather than hiding it.
Taiwan is the exception. It does not report to the World Bank and it is not one of the 195 UN members and observer states in our data set, so its figures come from the IMF, SIPRI and Taiwan's own agencies, each one cited on its own line. The counting question behind that is answered in how many countries are in the world.
Common questions
How do I compare two countries?
Type or pick a country in each field above and press Compare. The table fills with population, land area, GDP, GDP per capita, life expectancy, urban share, internet use and military spending for both, with the reference year on every figure and a line showing how many times larger one side is.
What is the difference between GDP and GDP per capita?
GDP is the total size of an economy in current US dollars. GDP per capita is that total divided by the population. A country can have a very large GDP and a modest GDP per capita, as India does, or a small GDP and one of the highest per capita figures in the world, as Luxembourg does.
Why do the two countries show different years?
Countries report to the World Bank on their own timetable. Rather than force every cell to a single year and drop the countries that have not reported yet, this tool keeps each country's most recent observation within a ten year window and prints the year next to it. A gap of a year or two between two cells is normal.
Why does Taiwan have caveats on its figures?
Taiwan is not a World Bank reporter, so its row is assembled from other sources: the IMF for GDP, SIPRI for military spending, and Taiwan's own Ministry of the Interior, DGBAS and TWNIC for life expectancy, population and internet use. Its internet figure counts adults only and its land area carries no reference year, so those two are not exactly like for like.
Why does a country show no reported figure for military spending?
Military expenditure is missing for about 40 states in this data set. Many of them, such as Iceland, Costa Rica and Panama, have no standing army at all. Others do not publish a figure SIPRI can verify. A blank is shown as no reported figure rather than as a zero, because those two mean different things.
Why does Vatican City have no numbers?
Vatican City is absent from every World Bank series used here, so every row reads no reported figure. It is a real state and a UN observer, it is simply too small and too unusual to appear in the World Development Indicators. Its area, under half a square kilometre, is covered on our smallest country page.
Can I share or bookmark a comparison?
Yes. The address bar updates as you compare, so a pair such as Japan and South Korea becomes a link ending in a=JP&b=KR that anyone can open on the same two countries. Bookmark it, send it, or edit the two codes in the address bar directly.
Is land area the same as the area in an atlas?
Not quite. The row here is land area, which excludes lakes, reservoirs and inland rivers. Atlases usually quote total surface area, which includes them. The gap is small for most countries and large for a few, which is why the two figures rarely match to the square kilometre.