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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Visualising Norwegian international trade and investments

I prepared a presentation for my Norwegian class today. It is about Norwegian foreign trade and investment flows with abroad.

Having acquired statistical data from Statistical Bureau of Norway, I did a little bit of data-mining and then created quite nice visualisations of who Norway trades with, which countries Norway invests and who invests in Norway. I am known fan of visualising complicated things to make them more comprehensible. This time I used great technology developed by Hans Rosling an his team which was later bought by Google and made usable for everyone having their own Google account and knowing how to use Google Docs.


The beauty of these visualisations is that it allows to notice progression, the speed with which both international trade and international investments have grown in the past 10-12 years. It also allows to easily recognise proportions of importance of particular countries for Norway in economical terms.


Particular results which are visible there:
  • Economically, the most important are Norway's North European neighbours - Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, UK, the Netherlands (one cannot get away from USA, of course, either).
  • China's growth as one of the largest importers of the goods during past decade is impressive
  • Norway has been investing a lot into Belgium. What is the explanation behind it?..

In order to get the full overview of the time dynamics, one needs to press the "Play" button in the graphs below (down-left corner of a graph).

    Flow of international trade in Norway 1999-2010



    Flow of international investments in Norway 1998-2009

    2 comments:

    proovibloog said...

    If you are a visualusation freak then try also http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/
    this software has produced some of the coolest graphs I have ever seen.

    Deniss Rutseikov Ojastu said...

    Thank you for a hint!

    It's a good one - I have used Many Eyes by IBM during last two years already - both for personal as well as professional reasons. I love this software!