I recently stumbled upon this site while looking up some stats on a specific country and wanted to also compare them with another country. The site is MyLifeElseWhere and I have been quite impressed by its simplicity, usefulness and user-interface; so much so that I think I should share this with others although I have no association with them whatsoever.
This is how they describe their site and purpose—
MyLifeElsewhere is a collaborative community that allows you to compare the country you live in with other countries around the world. We’ll show you various statistics that differentiate your country from others, including cost of living, geographic size, and more. If you moved to another country, what would your life be like?
With their online tool you can compare side by side, two countries, or a state (or city) with another country, or a state with another state. This is beautifully presented in an easy-to-understand, slick, interactive map and tables.
You can typically compare the following attributes:
SIZE COMPARISON
Area/size is square kilometers, population, and the coolest part is the overlapping of one country/state over the other being compared against…to provide a perfect sense of dimensions.
QUALITY OF LIFE
Some key metrics shown here are:
Health: e.g., How more/less likely are you going to be obese in one place vs the other?
Life: Deaths of women in childbirth. Infant mortality, etc.
Economy: Income. Unemployment. Taxes. etc.
Basic needs: Internet access.
Geography: coastlines comparison
COST OF LIVING
Typical cost at a restaurant in both places, fast food, groceries cost, gasoline, a new car purchase cost, etc.
Here’s the direct URL to a page comparing USA with Greece.
One obvious question is where are all these data coming from? Well, most of the data are available from any of the city, government sources for each country or state, wikipedia, WHO, and of course various other collections where data could be syndicated. Things such as size, etc. can be easily verified for accuracy as well on the Internet by anyone. The more interesting question may be: Where does the cost of living information come from?
The answer is crowd-sourcing. In fact, you can also contribute information (e.g. prices of goods) about your location to them and they encourage that to further fine-tune the data.
API Access? Yes, API access to their full data is available by submitting a form here.
Finally, without API, can you simply embed its content? Sure can. See this page for more information. For example, below is a snapshot of the snippet needed for Greece and USA comparison page:
Enjoy!
