I chose these 10 countries to highlight because I want to compare between the high and low debt to GDP ratio countries and they have data from 1995 to 2015. However, this bar chart is not ideal as I cannot compare the data across time.
Next, I tried a Beeswarm Plot to see the trend across time. I kept the other countries (besides the 10) to see the overall trend. The size of the circle corresponds to the level of debt to GDP ratio; the larger the circle, the higher the level of debt to GDP ratio.
This plot is also not helpful to my analysis due to a large amount of white spaces. By including all the 35 countries, this creates a lot of white spaces in between countries. This hindered my ability to compare between my 10 countries. The only things we can observe are that debt to GDP ratio change across time and it varies widely across countries.
General Government Debt (% of GDP)
Year
Finally, I used a Bump Chart. A Bump Chart will show the relative ranking of the countries in terms of Debt to GDP ratio across time. Each curvy bar represents one country. The width of curvy bar represents the size of the ratio. The larger the ratio in any specific year, the width of the curvy bar will be larger and the position of the curvy bar will be higher in the chart. This is more useful than the previous two visualizations as:
The 10 countries that I want to look at are highlighted in shades of orange/red (high rati0) or shades of purple/pink (low ratio). The rest of the countries are in gray, so as not to reduce the attention on the 10 countries. But when we see all the bars in aggregate, it appears that the total debt of the OECD was increasing across time, the summation of all the width of the bars was getting larger as time passes.
When comparing both the high ratio countries and low ratio countries, we can see that those that started high in 1995 tend to go even higher, while those that started low in 1995 went even lower. However, this is not always true as it is still possible to go in the reverse direction, though this is present for the countries in the middle spectrum of debt ratio. For example, Denmark and Portugal went from an average ratio to a low and high ratio respectively.
If the above relationship is true, it is troubling for governments as this might mean that once debt level reaches a certain threshold (middle of the spectrum), it is hard to bring it down.
High Government Debt-to-GDP Ratio Of The Past Went Even Higher and Vice Versa, Though There Are Exceptions
Government Debt-to-GDP Ratio (% of GDP)
Year