Global Leaves crosstab

7,101 of 7,360 administrative units across 237 countries, in one crosstab.

A ten-minute narrated walkthrough of the density × wealth crosstab across 7,101 administrative units.

The flagship result. Every administrative unit that carries both a population density and a per-capita income — 7,101 of the 7,360 FAND tracks, across 237 countries — placed in a 5×5 grid by the structure of its wealth.

What the crosstab shows

The world’s wealth distribution measured by what kind of capital dominates each place. The headline finding: a 38× measurement asymmetry between how finely rich, sparse places are measured and how finely poor, dense places are measured — 2,350 administrative units cover the Sparse+Rich cell, averaging 127,000 people each, while just 62 units cover Dense+Poor, averaging 3.9 million people each. Same balance-sheet identity, same population weighting; the measurement infrastructure itself is unevenly distributed, and it’s uneven in the direction that most needs granular governance data.

The method behind this: rather than comparing all administrative units at the same nominal level (a German Kreis of 80,000 people counted the same as a Nigerian state of 10 million), each of the 7,101 leaves is assigned to a population-weighted quintile — every quintile holds close to 20% of world population, not 20% of units. That’s what makes the lumpiness in unit counts a finding about the world’s data infrastructure rather than an artifact of the method.

The three charts

Side-by-side comparison of the conventional same-administrative-level approach against this analysis's population-weighted quintile approach, with density and per-capita-income quintile boundaries and population shares shown below
Why population-weighted quintiles, not same-level comparison: a unit with 10M people carries 125× the weight of one with 80K, and each quintile still lands within a point of the 20% target.
5x5 crosstab of density quintile against per-capita income quintile, each cell showing the percent of world population it holds
Population share by cell. If density and wealth were independent every cell would read 4.0% — instead the densest, lower-middle-income cell holds 6.0% and the densest, upper-middle-income cell is nearly empty at 0.9%.
5x5 crosstab of density quintile against per-capita income quintile, each cell showing the number of administrative units and their average population
The 38× measurement asymmetry: 2,350 units at a 0.1M average population cover Sparse+Rich; 62 units at a 3.9M average cover Dense+Poor.

Phase 2

The crosstab becomes an interactive D3 visualization — click a cell, drill into the countries inside it, click a country to land on its balance-sheet page. The data exists; the rendering is the only blocker.