Prevalence of early marriage (% of women) by Country

It's pretty intuitive to me that child marriage has measurable ill effects as you allude to in the graph caption.

Are there hard numbers on that -- e.g. timeseries showing economic improvements for women as child marriage has decreased historically?

this graph on a map is powerful: http://www.swivel.com/graph...

strange that it seems to radiate outwards from niger

With the map version i can see what visnu means by the numbers radiating outwards from Niger. I wonder if the countries with a higher prevalence of child marriage have similar customs, religion, view of women, etc. Or why exactly this is still taking place in some parts of the world and not others.

Thanks for your comments.

Data junkie: finding hard data is precisely the problem that we try to address with our data set; there is very little out there. We have tried to compile an historic overview of how early marriage developed across countries (http://www.swivel.com/data_...). You are welcome to compare this to the economic development of these countries, for example. Might be an interesting exercise.

Visnu/Natalie: early marriage is clearly related to a country's customs, religion or view of women. In our overview paper (http://ideas.repec.org/p/oe...) we find that inequalities in social institutions (such as marriage customs) are particularly high in part of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Middle East/North Africa region.