What countries publish the most books (relative to GDP)?

In the process of putting together the numbers for my post on reading the world logarithmically, I noticed that some countries with similar population sizes vary widely in how easy they are to find books for. Sometimes that is true even for countries that speak the same language and are in similar parts of the globe.

I started wondering about the variation in publication rates between countries. Having had so much fun with data-crunching posts recently, I thought I would do some exploring. The results turned out to be quite interesting!

I used data from Worldmapper.org,  a neat website which displays world maps in which the area of each country is scaled based on a particular statistic, whether it be population size or the number of nurses in a country. Here is their map for book publication: http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=343. They very helpfully make the data they use available for download which made it easy for me to play around with it. Unfortunately, they have actual data for only 100 countries, so my results are somewhat limited. More detailed comments about the data are at the bottom of this post.

At first, I just looked at books published per capita.

Here’s the top 10:

		Books published per million people:
1	Vatican City	228000
2	Iceland	5987
3	Denmark	2677
4	Switzerland	2538
5	Finland	2533
6	Estonia	2512
7	Andorra	2507
8	Monaco	2195
9	United Kingdom	2135
10	Slovenia	2118

 

And here’s the bottom 10 (keep in mind that data is missing for nearly half of the world’s countries and that countries with few books published are probably more likely to be missing data):

		Books published per million people:
90	Myanmar	4.64
91	Oman	4.29
92	Algeria	4.25
93	Mali	2.62
94	Democratic Republic of Congo	2.19
95	Angola	1.67
96	Benin	1.36
97	Togo	1.04
98	Indonesia	0.56
99	Burkina Faso	0.40
100	Ghana	0.34

 

Surprise! Wealthier countries publish more books than poorer countries! You can see this quite clearly by graphing per capita GDP versus books published per capita. (I had to leave out Vatican City because at about 40 times more books per capita than any other country, it completely dwarfed all the others. Plus, Vatican City is a special case and I don’t think it’s reasonable to compare it to other countries.)

Iceland really does stand out with more than twice as many books published per person than any other country. I wasn’t surprised by this because Google is full of articles about how 1 in 10 Icelanders is an author. But it is also a pretty wealthy country which gives it a bit of an advantage.

I wanted to identify the countries that aren’t necessarily publishing the most books, but that are outperforming their economic situation. To do that, I needed some equation to calculate the expected number of books published for a given GDP. I tried a linear regression first, but that wasn’t a great fit for the data. A power law gave a better fit and seemed to be less biased for/against countries at the upper and lower end of the GDP scale. Then I calculated the percentage by which each country’s actual publication rate differed from the prediction.

I’m not going to list the bottom 10 countries, because I think that list is misleading for several reasons. I can say however that countries with high oil production tend to under-perform. It seems that oil wealth does not translate into literary wealth.

Here are the 10 countries which published the most books relative to their economic status:

		Books published per million people:
		Predicted:	Actual:
1	Republic of Moldova	10	271
2	Estonia	311	2512
3	Belarus	87	613
4	Kyrgyzstan	12	82
5	Malawi	2	15
6	Georgia	21	134
7	Sri Lanka	43	246
8	Lithuania	236	1171
9	Latvia	197	947
10	Armenia	35	166

 

I find this result fascinating! (Iceland, by the way, just missed inclusion at #12) First of all, 8 of the top 10 are former members of the U.S.S.R, with the Baltic region being particularly well represented.  I particularly enjoy the fact that Moldova comes out on top, given that they so often get attention for more negative statistics. Sri Lanka, it turns out, makes some sense as it has a quite high literacy rate for a developing country- 91%.

Malawi’s presence on this list startled me. It is one of the poorest countries in Africa and in the world. In an absolute sense, the number of books published there is small. But it is huge compared to comparably poor countries. When I did web searches for books in Malawi, I found several commentaries complaining about the dearth of books in Malawi, but it seems like they may be doing better than they think.

 

More details:

• The countries used by Worldmapper.prg are not entirely the same as my book-from-every-country list. For example, their list includes Vatican City, which I don’t include.
• Amongst the many countries for which data is missing are both U.S. and China. There are other numbers for publication rates in the U.S. but I didn’t include it in my calculations since the source is different. If I had included it, the U.S. would have come out somewhere in the vicinity of Norway, which is the right-most point on the graph.
• The data that Worldmapper.org used are from UNESCO. I can’t figure out how to look at the original data for UNESCO, so I don’t know how they collected the data. It also seems like UNESCO may no longer be collecting data on book publication rates, which is unfortunate.
• Book publishing data are for year closest to 1999 for which there is data. To make their map, Worldmapper used estimates based on other countries in the region for countries which lacked data. 
• GDP data are for 2002 because that’s the closest year to 1999 that was in the Worldmapper dataset. GDP data is in terms of $US, corrected for purchasing power parity.
  
• There are a lot of problems with the use of GDP as a measure (some of which are described very well in this post). I strongly oppose using GDP as a measure of progress or development. I use it here as a rough measure of a country’s economic status because it is widely measured and easily available.
• The specific list of countries which publish most relative to their GDP depends on the choice of what type equation is used to calculate prediction publication rate. My choice of equation type was somewhat arbitrary, and definitely not scientific. That being said, the countries listed are clearly ones that are publishing a lot relative to their economic status.