Last European coloniser: United Kingdom · Largest religious group: Christians. These are labels that describe the country, not numbers, so they are never compared with other measures. The numbers behind them, such as population shares, are.

South Africa

How it has changed

Every measure South Africa reports, over all the years it has been published. Pick one. Hover or use the arrow keys to read a year. Gaps in a line are years with no data. They are left open, not filled in.

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Scores by area

Each score averages the measures in one area, such as health. Each measure is first put on a common scale and turned so that higher is always better. Zero is the average country in an average year. One point is a typical gap between countries (a standard deviation), so +1 means about one typical gap above average. These are summaries, not measurements. See how the country scores are built and how the topic scores compare with each other.

The last column shows how closely each score just tracks national income. The number is its link with GDP per person (the value of everything a country produces, divided by its people), from −1 to +1. A score marked proxy is mostly a measure of how rich the country is. Its rank among all countries says little that GDP per person does not. That is why the rank among similar-income countries sits beside it.

The measures behind them

Every measure reported for South Africa, grouped by area. Some measures have no agreed better direction, such as population growth, inflation and military spending. They are listed here but left out of every score, since there is no fair way to say which way is better. Some names use technical terms: PPP means adjusted for what money buys in each country, HDI is a United Nations score combining life expectancy, schooling and income, and a Gini indexmeasures how unequally income is shared. Each measure’s own page explains it.

Values are the most recent in 2010–2025, and different measures can come from different years. The year is shown beside each. Nothing here ranks countries by merit. An area score averages whatever measures its publishers happen to collect, and the choice of what to collect is itself a judgement made by someone else. All countries · How the country data works

Countries to compare with South Africa

Also in Sub-Saharan Africa: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Dem. Rep., Congo, Rep., Cote d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, The, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Fed. Rep., South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Also upper middle income, in other regions: Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belize, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Georgia, Grenada, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, Islamic Rep., Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia, Fed. Sts., Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, and more on the full list of countries.