Which countries have similar socioeconomic conditions?
To find out, I used a dataset from Kaggle and applied hierarchial clustering to it, then cut the tree into 12 clusters. The result demonstrated things that we already know based on how we generally divide the globe into "rich" and "poor" countries. We could see that, broadly speaking, coutries that are more economically on par with one another tend have similar economic conditions.
Examining the countries that form up each cluster, a few notable observations stand out to me. Firstly, I was surprised to see South Korea in the same large cluster as many Central Asian, Eastern European and Carribean countries, and I didn't know that China's socioeconomics is so similar to that of Central and South American countries. Unsurprisngly, the Netherlands is the most simialr to Belgium, followed by Ireland, Switzerland and Norway, as these countries are all known to be ranked quite highly in terms of living standards and happiness. It is also notable to me that Singapore, Malta and Luxembourg distinguishes themselves as three similarly small countries with an advanced economy. Finally, Nigeria stands out on its own, most likely due to its incredibly high inflation.