Identifying correlations in economic data

How can the influence of numeric variables on others be measured and visualized? In this example, using economic data for different countries, we analyze correlations between variables and construct a representative graph. We also explain how the same technique can be applied to other types of data.

Analyzed data:

The following economic variables were obtained for 187 countries, and this over a 55 year span (10287 rows total):

• Country name and code
• Year
• Population
• Exchange rate
• Purchasing power parity
• Real GDP
• Consumption share of GDP
• Government share of GDP
• Investment share of GDP
• Openness in constant prices
• …several others…