Earthy Explorations

My teacher a few weeks back talked about one Economist writer who had noted a positive correlation of latitude to GDP per Capita, so I decided to put the idea to the test (Mathematica has functions which can give data--the most recent, up-to-date data--on all countries who will give it. I hypothesized the same, because when I though about it: Africa and South America suffered much the same at the hands of colonizers; their wealth of resources made them prime targets for the European, resource-depleted powers (in the 19th and 20th century).

My algorithm:

Make a Module assigned to a Function to do this first part, where the variable is a country.

Take the first part of all of the country's coordinates (the latitude). Average it, then take the absolute value (it's quite important to take the absolute value after the summation, since otherwise, places right on the equator, instead of positive and negative latitudes negating each other, would keep adding to each other and give the wrong average latitude). Then, after getting their average, get the country's GDP per Capita. Finally, create for the country its point, {Latitude, GDP per Capita}.

Map all the countries with CountryData[] to the Function, which will take a wee bit long (I had to run it when I went to sleep).

ListPlot[] the points and use Tooltip[] to label each and every point.

Data:


Conclusion: There's definitely some correlation, which supports my previous hypothesis that Latitude and GDP per Capita would correlate. There are a few outliers, obviously, like Greenland which is at the very pole, but has a relatively low GDP per Capita, and Singapore which is near the equator but has a high GDP per Capita.

Credits: Map[], ListPlot[], Tooltip[], Module[], CountryData[]