Child Mortality around the World

The enormous progress in life expectancy, almost everywhere in the world over the past 200 years, is primarily due to the reduction in child mortality.  It used to be common for close to half of all children to die by age 5, and this figure was still 10% in the US as late as 1928.  Here's a graph showing child mortality and GDP per capita since 1900, with each dot representing a country, and the size of the dot proportionate to population.  The US is the largest red dot, China and India are the largest yellow dots, the countries with even lower mortality rates than the US are mostly in Europe (blue dots) or on the western edge of the Pacific (yellow dots for Japan, South Korea).  Africa continues to have the highest death rates, but it too has seen major improvements.

This graphic is not an original idea.  Hans Rosling famously narrated a similar graph showing life expectancy rather than childhood mortality.  I built the graph primarily to practice some R skills.  Making a graph with the ggplot and gganimate packages takes just a couple minutes, but combining the data from 4 separate files (with population, mortality, and GDP files each having 216 columns for the 216 years of data) took me some time to figure out and get just right.  After cleaning the data files and putting the continent information in the income file, I merged them with the following bit of code.  (Note that "k" increments with every loop, leading to a dataframe of 43392 rows and just 6 columns.)

# build main dataframe "df" used by ggplot

df = data.frame(country=character(), continent=character(), year=integer(), income=integer(), population=integer(), mortality=double(), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

# Loop through 192 countries & 216 Years (1800-2015) + 10 duplicate years.

k = 0

for(i in 1:192){

for(j in 2:227){

  k = k + 1

  df[k, 1] = df_inc[i, 1]

  df[k, 2] = df_inc[i, 2]

  df[k, 3] = 1798 + j

  df[k, 4] = df_inc[i, j+1]

  df[k, 5] = df_pop[i, j]

  df[k, 6] = df_mort[i, j] / 1000

}}

Data source: https://www.gapminder.org/data/

Hans Rosling video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPt8ElTQMIg