Europe & Russia

In 2015, more than 1.8 million people crossed the European Union’s borders illegally, up from 280,000 detections of illegal border crossings in 2014.

Americans have good reason to worry about competition from China, the country with which the U.S. has its largest merchandise trade deficit. But competition from high-value exporters such as Germany also poses a challenge that, so far, has been largely ignored on the campaign trail.

Gender equality is among the most widely accepted democratic principles around the world.

People in emerging and developing nations are quickly catching up to those in advanced nations in terms of access to technology.

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, both economically and socially, technology adoption remains one of the defining factors in human progress. To that end, there has been a noticeable rise over the past two years in the percentage of people in the emerging and developing nations surveyed by Pew Research Center who say that they use the internet and own a smartphone.

The view that torture may be justified is most common in sub-Saharan Africa, where a median of 55% hold this view; it is least common in Latin America (a median of 25%). In the U.S., 58% say torture can be justified as part of efforts to prevent terrorist attacks.

More than six years after the Great Recession ended, almost 10.2 million teens and young adults in the U.S. are neither working nor in school.

Americans place less importance on religion in their lives than do people in a number of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia -- but more than residents of many other Western and European countries.