Earlier this week, the World Health Organisation ranked the globe’s biggest drinking nations — but it didn’t quite tell the entire story. This is what the data looks like if you ignore abstainers.
Those pesky non-drinkers skew the average slightly, you see. While most of Belarus — the highest consuming nation according to the WHO — drinks, then, it doesn’t mean that it drinks as hard as the minority number of soaks in other countries. So The Economist took the WHO data, stripped out the abstainers, and looked at the results afresh.
Turns out that while almost 90 per cent of Chad’s population don’t drink, the 780,000 drinkers it is home to put away almost 34 litres of pure alcohol a year. Compare that to the Belarus, where people put away just 17.5 litres averaged across the population, and clearly the guys in Chad party pretty damn hard. Similarly for UAE and Gambia. Evidently, there aren’t enough abstainers in Australia to significantly affect its rank from the original report. [Economist]
