placestats

Alcohol consumption vs. One-person households

Holds up after adjusting for income

Across 141 countries, Alcohol consumption and One-person households rise and fall together at r = +0.74 (on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 means no link). It holds up almost unchanged when only countries with similar income (GDP per person) are compared (r = +0.60, q = 0.010, allowing for the many pairs tested).

Comparing countries across the middle half of one-person households, 6.64% to 22.6% of households, alcohol consumption is 4.52 litres per adult per year higher at the top of that range than the bottom. Comparing only countries with similar national income, the gap is 4.2 litres per adult per year.

Link before adjusting (r)+0.738p = 1.5e-25 · 141 countries
After adjusting for national income+0.601p = 4.2e-15 · likely range [+0.48, +0.70]
p, allowing for regions0.003standard error 0.122 · 7 regions
Check for luck (q)0.010across 12,497 pairs

How to read these.r runs from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together), and 0 means no link. Adjusting for national income means comparing countries with the same GDP per person, so differences in wealth can’t explain the link. Income is used in percentage terms, since an extra $1,000 means more to a poor country than to a rich one. p is how likely a link this strong would be if there were really none. Below 0.05 means it is unlikely to be chance. Very small values are written in short form: 1.1e-32 means a decimal point followed by 31 zeros and then 11, so very close to zero. The likely range is where the true figure probably lies, and a range that crosses zero means the link could easily be chance. Countries in the same region tend to resemble each other, so the third figure allows for that, which gives a fairer p. The standard error is the typical size of the error in r. Finally, testing this many pairs means some will look strong by luck alone. A q below 0.05 means this link is unlikely to be one of those.

Alcohol consumption · litres per adult per yearlink with income +0.51 · moderate
One-person households · % of householdslink with income +0.70 · high

“Link with income” is how closely each measure tracks GDP per person across countries, from −1 to +1.

Every country as a dot

Alcohol consumption · litres per adult per year →One-person households · % of households →016.80.19%41.1%Afghanistan: 0.011 litres per adult per year, 0.19% of householdsAngola: 4.13 litres per adult per year, 10.8% of householdsAlbania: 4.47 litres per adult per year, 9.95% of householdsArgentina: 8.05 litres per adult per year, 22.8% of householdsArmenia: 4.28 litres per adult per year, 15.2% of householdsAustralia: 10.3 litres per adult per year, 22.8% of householdsAustria: 11.5 litres per adult per year, 36.3% of householdsBurundi: 4.16 litres per adult per year, 6.04% of householdsBelgium: 9.43 litres per adult per year, 34% of householdsBenin: 8.83 litres per adult per year, 9.78% of householdsBurkina Faso: 11.3 litres per adult per year, 6.64% of householdsBangladesh: 0.092 litres per adult per year, 2.85% of householdsBulgaria: 11.6 litres per adult per year, 30.8% of householdsBahamas, The: 3.65 litres per adult per year, 17.7% of householdsBosnia and Herzegovina: 5.87 litres per adult per year, 11.5% of householdsBelarus: 11.6 litres per adult per year, 38% of householdsBelize: 3.67 litres per adult per year, 17.2% of householdsBolivia: 3.59 litres per adult per year, 20.5% of householdsBrazil: 7.7 litres per adult per year, 12% of householdsBarbados: 8.22 litres per adult per year, 26.3% of householdsBrunei Darussalam: 0.51 litres per adult per year, 7.22% of householdsBhutan: 0.18 litres per adult per year, 6.13% of householdsCentral African Republic: 1.75 litres per adult per year, 6.2% of householdsCanada: 9.89 litres per adult per year, 28.2% of householdsChile: 7.56 litres per adult per year, 20.2% of householdsCote d'Ivoire: 2.85 litres per adult per year, 17% of householdsCameroon: 9.6 litres per adult per year, 15.3% of householdsCongo, Dem. Rep.: 1.92 litres per adult per year, 7.55% of householdsCongo, Rep.: 6.05 litres per adult per year, 13.8% of householdsColombia: 4.24 litres per adult per year, 11.1% of householdsComoros: 0.23 litres per adult per year, 4.91% of householdsCosta Rica: 3.4 litres per adult per year, 12.1% of householdsCyprus: 6.36 litres per adult per year, 20.8% of householdsCzechia: 12 litres per adult per year, 32.5% of householdsGermany: 11.8 litres per adult per year, 37.3% of householdsDominican Republic: 6.5 litres per adult per year, 20.1% of householdsAlgeria: 0.54 litres per adult per year, 1.61% of householdsEgypt, Arab Rep.: 0.13 litres per adult per year, 6.48% of householdsSpain: 9.16 litres per adult per year, 23.2% of householdsEthiopia: 3.06 litres per adult per year, 6.36% of householdsFinland: 9.08 litres per adult per year, 41% of householdsFiji: 3.58 litres per adult per year, 5.94% of householdsFrance: 10.3 litres per adult per year, 35.5% of householdsGabon: 8.14 litres per adult per year, 22.4% of householdsUnited Kingdom: 10.7 litres per adult per year, 30.6% of householdsGeorgia: 14.4 litres per adult per year, 15% of householdsGhana: 4.26 litres per adult per year, 21.5% of householdsGuinea: 0.52 litres per adult per year, 5.07% of householdsGambia, The: 0.61 litres per adult per year, 9.72% of householdsGuinea-Bissau: 3.73 litres per adult per year, 4.14% of householdsGreece: 5.81 litres per adult per year, 25.7% of householdsGuatemala: 1.54 litres per adult per year, 4.33% of householdsGuyana: 5.04 litres per adult per year, 15.8% of householdsHonduras: 3.08 litres per adult per year, 10.4% of householdsCroatia: 7.65 litres per adult per year, 24.6% of householdsHaiti: 3.11 litres per adult per year, 9.43% of householdsHungary: 9.93 litres per adult per year, 32.1% of householdsIndonesia: 0.074 litres per adult per year, 7.1% of householdsIndia: 4.1 litres per adult per year, 5.11% of householdsIreland: 10.8 litres per adult per year, 22% of householdsIran, Islamic Rep.: 0.51 litres per adult per year, 7.16% of householdsIraq: 0.24 litres per adult per year, 1.01% of householdsItaly: 6.97 litres per adult per year, 31.1% of householdsJamaica: 3.1 litres per adult per year, 28.2% of householdsJordan: 0.23 litres per adult per year, 4.36% of householdsJapan: 6.38 litres per adult per year, 34.5% of householdsKazakhstan: 4.52 litres per adult per year, 15.5% of householdsKenya: 2.47 litres per adult per year, 19.4% of householdsKyrgyz Republic: 3.63 litres per adult per year, 12.3% of householdsCambodia: 6.67 litres per adult per year, 3.37% of householdsKiribati: 0.72 litres per adult per year, 3.71% of householdsKorea, Rep.: 7.79 litres per adult per year, 31.8% of householdsLao PDR: 10.8 litres per adult per year, 3.18% of householdsLiberia: 2.86 litres per adult per year, 12% of householdsSt. Lucia: 9.28 litres per adult per year, 26.8% of householdsLesotho: 4.3 litres per adult per year, 18% of householdsLithuania: 12.1 litres per adult per year, 31.7% of householdsLuxembourg: 10.8 litres per adult per year, 33.3% of householdsLatvia: 12.9 litres per adult per year, 41.1% of householdsMorocco: 0.5 litres per adult per year, 7.2% of householdsMoldova: 11.1 litres per adult per year, 22.6% of householdsMadagascar: 0.99 litres per adult per year, 7.11% of householdsMaldives: 1.49 litres per adult per year, 4.49% of householdsMexico: 4.79 litres per adult per year, 10.1% of householdsNorth Macedonia: 4.36 litres per adult per year, 11.8% of householdsMali: 5.32 litres per adult per year, 3.11% of householdsMalta: 7.11 litres per adult per year, 22.6% of householdsMyanmar: 1.93 litres per adult per year, 5.35% of householdsMontenegro: 10.3 litres per adult per year, 15.4% of householdsMongolia: 7.68 litres per adult per year, 8.96% of householdsMozambique: 1.89 litres per adult per year, 8.41% of householdsMauritania: 0 litres per adult per year, 3.97% of householdsMalawi: 3.61 litres per adult per year, 7.2% of householdsNamibia: 5.05 litres per adult per year, 17.4% of householdsNiger: 0.13 litres per adult per year, 3.19% of householdsNigeria: 3.78 litres per adult per year, 14.7% of householdsNorway: 7.38 litres per adult per year, 39.6% of householdsNepal: 1.06 litres per adult per year, 4.51% of householdsNew Zealand: 10 litres per adult per year, 21.9% of householdsPakistan: 0.084 litres per adult per year, 1.08% of householdsPanama: 4.66 litres per adult per year, 13.4% of householdsPeru: 6.45 litres per adult per year, 16.8% of householdsPhilippines: 5.66 litres per adult per year, 9.18% of householdsPoland: 11.7 litres per adult per year, 24% of householdsPortugal: 8.88 litres per adult per year, 21.4% of householdsParaguay: 5.62 litres per adult per year, 10.4% of householdsQatar: 1.05 litres per adult per year, 6.98% of householdsRomania: 16.8 litres per adult per year, 26% of householdsRussian Federation: 10.5 litres per adult per year, 25.7% of householdsRwanda: 2.87 litres per adult per year, 7.69% of householdsSudan: 0.01 litres per adult per year, 1.59% of householdsSenegal: 0.38 litres per adult per year, 6.92% of householdsSingapore: 1.81 litres per adult per year, 16.1% of householdsSierra Leone: 0.29 litres per adult per year, 6.42% of householdsEl Salvador: 3.15 litres per adult per year, 8.46% of householdsSomalia, Fed. Rep.: 0 litres per adult per year, 1.53% of householdsSerbia: 7.89 litres per adult per year, 21.8% of householdsSao Tome and Principe: 4.79 litres per adult per year, 13.8% of householdsSuriname: 5.93 litres per adult per year, 14% of householdsSlovak Republic: 10.7 litres per adult per year, 25.3% of householdsSlovenia: 10.4 litres per adult per year, 32.6% of householdsEswatini: 6.79 litres per adult per year, 21.7% of householdsChad: 2.91 litres per adult per year, 5.43% of householdsTogo: 1.44 litres per adult per year, 15.7% of householdsThailand: 7.99 litres per adult per year, 21.6% of householdsTajikistan: 0.74 litres per adult per year, 2.88% of householdsTurkmenistan: 2.62 litres per adult per year, 3.74% of householdsTimor-Leste: 0.17 litres per adult per year, 6.41% of householdsTonga: 0.36 litres per adult per year, 6.94% of householdsTunisia: 1.71 litres per adult per year, 6.27% of householdsTuvalu: 1.26 litres per adult per year, 6.92% of householdsTanzania: 10.9 litres per adult per year, 9.63% of householdsUganda: 11.3 litres per adult per year, 13.2% of householdsUkraine: 9.24 litres per adult per year, 25% of householdsUruguay: 5.61 litres per adult per year, 17.6% of householdsUnited States: 9.9 litres per adult per year, 27.9% of householdsViet Nam: 8.04 litres per adult per year, 10.5% of householdsSamoa: 2.35 litres per adult per year, 4.4% of householdsSouth Africa: 7.13 litres per adult per year, 23.8% of householdsZambia: 3.62 litres per adult per year, 7.97% of householdsZimbabwe: 2.67 litres per adult per year, 12.9% of householdsAFGBFABLRGEOJAMJPNLAOLVANORPAKROUSOM

best-fit line line after adjusting

Four ways to measure the link

MethodrpCountries
Standard (Pearson), not adjusted+0.7381.5e-25141
By rank (Spearman), not adjusted+0.7616.9e-28141
Standard (Pearson), adjusted for national income+0.6014.2e-15141
By rank (Spearman), adjusted for national income+0.6193.7e-16141

The rank version uses only each country’s place in line, from lowest to highest, so a few extreme countries count for less. The adjusted and unadjusted versions use the same 141 countries: those that report both measures and GDP per person. So the gap between them comes from the adjustment, not from a change in which countries are counted. Drop in the size of r after adjusting: +0.137 (a minus sign means it grew).

How solid is it?

Leaving out one country at a time, r ranges from +0.581 (without QAT) to +0.629 (without LAO). The bar above shows that range on a scale from −1 to +1, with the solid line at the full result. The single country that moves r most: LAO (+0.028).

Within each region

Countries are not separate, unrelated cases, and neighbors share a lot. A link that holds inside each region is far more believable than one that shows up only when comparing regions.

nr
East Asia & Pacific20+0.36
Europe & Central Asia39+0.46
Latin America & Caribbean23+0.51
Sub-Saharan Africa41+0.30

By income third

If the link shows up only in the richest third of countries, it is a feature of rich countries, not a general pattern.

nr
Poorest third47+0.38
Middle third47+0.61
Richest third47+0.62

By largest religious group

Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.

nr
Christians90+0.45
Muslims35+0.45

By last european coloniser

Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.

nr
France22+0.25
Never a European colony15+0.29
Spain16+0.64
United Kingdom44+0.71

Without outliers (countries far outside the middle half of countries on either measure, by more than one and a half times the width of that middle half): r = +0.601 after dropping 0 countries.

Two series, one country

Both measures over the years for one country you pick. The two charts are stacked so they share only the years along the bottom.

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Over time, within countries

Everything above compares countries with each other at one moment. This section compares each country only with itself over 21years. So a link here can’t come from anything about a country that stays the same, such as its history, geography, institutions or culture.

Within countries over time, there is no link that is clearly more than chance (r = -0.007, comparing each country only with itself over the years, and each year only with the same year elsewhere). Whatever the cross-country picture shows, countries whose alcohol consumption moved did not tend to see their one-person households move with it.

Across countries (adjusted)+0.601for comparison
Within countries+0.029each country vs itself
…and vs the same year elsewhere-0.007q = 0.974 · 36 countries
Year-on-year changes—q = —
Read with care.
  • Almost all of the second indicator's variation is between countries, so the within-country estimate rests on a small part of the data.

231 country-years (one country in one year), 36 countries, 2000–2020, about 6 years each on average. Share of the variation that happens within countries over time: 15% for Alcohol consumption, 7% for One-person households. The margins of error allow for each country appearing many times, and for each year’s value being close to the year before.

Year-to-year changes are a cautious test, not a final answer. Looking only at changes from one year to the next removes each country’s own trends. But it also makes measurement mistakes louder, which pulls the results toward zero. A near-zero result here is weak evidence of no link, not proof.

With one measure years behind the other

0.20−0.2-60+0years One-person households trails Alcohol consumption →lag -6: r = -0.036 (n = 203)lag -5: r = -0.050 (n = 228)lag -4: r = -0.070 (n = 228)lag -3: r = -0.042 (n = 233)lag -2: r = -0.119 (n = 242)lag -1: r = -0.072 (n = 253)lag +0: r = -0.007 (n = 231)

Same year (lag 0): -0.007. A peak away from zero does not show which comes first. These series change slowly — this year’s value is close to last year’s. That makes the curve smooth and nearly symmetric, whatever produced the data. Even a sharp peak at one lag (a gap of some years) would not prove that one measure changes the other.

The largest value on this curve (-0.12 at lag -2) is higher than the same-year one by 0.11. That gap is not a finding. It is the largest of 7 closely related estimates, and picking the biggest of many tests always makes it look bigger. That is exactly why nothing on this site is ranked or chosen by lag.

The data


litres per adult per year
% of households		Years
Romania ROU16.826%2020, 2011
Georgia GEO14.415%2020, 2018
Latvia LVA12.941.1%2020, 2021
Lithuania LTU12.131.7%2020, 2011
Czechia CZE1232.5%2020, 2011
Germany DEU11.837.3%2020, 2011
Poland POL11.724%2020, 2011
Belarus BLR11.638%2020, 2019
Bulgaria BGR11.630.8%2020, 2011
Austria AUT11.536.3%2020, 2011
Uganda UGA11.313.2%2020, 2019
Burkina Faso BFA11.36.64%2020, 2014
Moldova MDA11.122.6%2020, 2014
Tanzania TZA10.99.63%2020, 2015
Luxembourg LUX10.833.3%2020, 2011

World Bank, World Development Indicators
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2022). Database on Household Size and Composition 2022.

Sources

Alcohol consumption

Total alcohol consumption per capita (litres of pure alcohol, age 15+)

World Health Organization Global Health Observatory · CC BY 4.0 · updated quarterly

Recorded drinking plus an estimate of unrecorded drinking, per person aged fifteen and over. Ends in 2020. No "better" direction is set, and the reason is the strongest fact about this measure on the site. Of everything here, it is what most separates countries by their largest religion. Alcohol is forbidden in Islam, so a low figure in a Muslim-majority country is religious practice showing up in a health statistic. Calling that end "best" would make this site score religious practice, which it refuses to do everywhere else. Every measure of attendance, prayer, marriage and belief here has no "better" direction for exactly that reason. This is the same fact arriving through a different column. The World Health Organization is right that alcohol carries a real burden of disease, and the site does not dispute it. It declines to turn that into a score for a country, when the thing being scored would largely be how many of its people are Muslim.

One-person households

Share of one-person households

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division · via Our World in Data · CC BY 3.0 IGO · updated irregular (2017, 2019 and 2022 editions)

Households of one person, from the same UN collection as the single-parent share and with the same limits: one to three readings per country, from sources that sort households differently, and few after 2019. It rises with age and with income, and falls with family size. That is three different things in one number. No "better" direction is set.

How this was computed

Data used: most recent value in 2010-2025; values come from 2010–2021. To adjust for income, each measure is first predicted from GDP per person (in percentage terms, on a log scale) with a straight-line fit. Only what is left over is then compared. This is called a partial correlation. The line is drawn the standard way (ordinary least squares), which picks the line that comes closest to all the countries at once. The error margins allow for countries in the same region resembling each other, using 7 World Bank regions. The q-value corrects for testing all 12,497 pairs at once, using the Benjamini–Hochberg method. Underlying data last updated DYB 2024. How the country data works · explore Alcohol consumption and One-person households

This page shows that two measures go together. It does not show that Alcohol consumption changes One-person households, or the reverse. These figures also describe countries, not individual people. See the ecological fallacy.

More links with Alcohol consumption or One-person households