OECD Pensions Explorer

Will your pension keep its promise?

Pension systems involve a delicate balance — ensuring adequate benefits, maintaining fiscal sustainability, and reducing inequality in old age. This app visualizes those trade-offs through clear, interactive comparisons across OECD countries.

Inspiration

I wanted to turn complex policy indicators into something intuitive and explorable. Too often, pension debates rely on isolated metrics; this project connects them — replacement rates, spending, retirement age, and elderly poverty — so users can see how countries perform on multiple fronts.

How it was built

The dashboard was designed entirely in Plotly Studio Pro, using only the built-in components and a compact dataset (<75 MB). The data were curated from OECD Pensions at a Glance, SOCX, and LFS sources, harmonized and merged into a reproducible dataset.

Each card tells a story:

  • Choropleth → How generous are pensions?
  • Line chart → At what cost and age?
  • Scatter → Who is left behind?
  • Radar → How do countries compare?

What I learned

Plotly Studio is remarkably effective for rapid prototyping — it allows data stories to come alive with minimal setup, yet offers the control needed for analytical depth. It was also a lesson in designing for clarity: how to express complex ideas with the least possible friction.

Challenges

The main challenge was fitting multiple indicators and layouts into a single coherent narrative without code customization. Balancing color, density, and interactivity to preserve readability took several iterations, but the result is a clean, policy-ready visualization.

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