Country Data and Benford's Law

Benford's law, also called the first digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many sources of data, the leading digit is 1 almost one-third of the time. Moreover, subsequent values appear first with decreasing frequency; 9 occurs as a leading digit only one time in twenty. Many types of numerical data about countries approximately follow this law. This Demonstration shows the distributions of various types of numeric country data.