International indices

 News came over the weekend that El Salvador had leapt to the top of the incarceration league with the opening of a new super-prison. With potentially 2% of her population locked up, she has overtaken not only Turkmenistan and Rwanda, but also USA, for long the world's leader. So World Population Review's latest table is already out-of-date. But where does the UK figure in this table? I had long believed that we had the second highest incarceration rate in the world, which has led to Liberal Democrats long campaigning for removal of many non-violent offences' ceasing to be imprisonable and for constructive alternatives to prison. For some reason, World Population Review does not include us in its data. The UK government publishes figures: England & Wales, 159 per 100,000; Scotland 162. Those would place England & Wales level with Malta and Scotland with Botswana, well below 100th place on the international table, below even New Zealand, which seems fishy, I suspect that there is a difference between definitions of "adult population". The Ministry of Justice uses the age of 15 as the lower limit, whereas 18 would surely be more realistic. 

Corruption perception figures were also published recently and Uruguay celebrated rising to rank alongside Canada, confirming her position as the least corrupt nation in the Hispanic world. The UK has slipped to 18th jointly with Belgium and Japan. (El Salvador is joint 116th on the list, by the way,)

Finally, the Polish government announced that the nation will soon overtake the UK in GDP per head. Certainly, President Duda was feted at the recent World Economic Forum and Poland is enjoying a reverse brain-drain. This trend was bound to affect us anyway, but Brexit has caused us to suffer disproportionately. The latest World Bank figures show that there is still a GDP gap, however. There is an even bigger gap (UK at 26, Poland at 46) in the Worldometer table, which presents a fuller picture, taking other indices into account, but that reflects the situation in 2017, before Brexit and before the latest Polish surge. Certainly, we will have to work hard just to maintain our standing in view of the IMF's latest economic growth projections.