Cartogram: A New Perspective to Understand the Distribution of Geopolitical Data

Abstract. The global competitiveness index (GCI) of a country is a comprehensive indicator to measure its social-economic development, sustainability and prospects reflecting national competitiveness by World Economic Forum (WEF, 2013). Thematic maps are commonly used to visualize such geo-distributed data. Cartogram resizes the area of polygons according to a specific variable providing a new perspective to understand the distribution of country's competitiveness on world. Essentially, cartogram presents a different cognitive space which differs from the well-known geographic space. In this paper, we generate the GCI cartogram with a combination of color scheme and compare it with the traditional thematic map to gain a better understanding of the distribution of country’s competitiveness.