Dataset of the Day: Worldwide Consumption Behavior; Tobacco, Alcohol and Education

One of my favorite things about Finder is that it allows disparate datasets to come together into one place. Prompted by the increasing price of avocados at the grocery, I wanted to take a peek at how people’s consumption changes globally in response to inflation. The USDA has an impressive set of data on individual’s consumption behavior by country. Across many goods (fuel, rent, medical, etc) and many foods (fish, cereals, dairy, etc) their data explain how people in different countries respond to changes in prices. Consider the first map below: deeper orange indicates a relatively greater decrease in the amount of money spent on food for every increase in its price.

One might see right away that many countries including India, China, and several throughout Africa are not included in the dataset. Otherwise, the map didn’t surprise me much. Still, there is much more to poke at in the data. What about so-called sin spending? Tobacco and Alcoholic Beverages (Price Elasticity):

Compared to the food map above, there is a greater range in elasticity in this map. In Some countries in Africa people decrease their spending on tobacco and beverages very quickly when the price increases. However, this time there is more of a range in responses across the map.

I wanted to see how this information about people’s preferences matched up to their current day spending, so I compared it with data from the World Bank. The first map below, which represents the amount of spending on Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco per person (excluding the US) bears a funny resemblance to the second map: education spending per person.

Putting maps like this together is fairly simple in Google Documents. Just download one of the datasets in csv format and follow the directions . Try it out with the UN Food Production Index the next time you read another Malthusian food price editorial.