Lawrence, the African Uptimist, points us in the direction of a tool called Gapminder. He has a good quick summary of what the tool is and how it works.

…the Gapminder puts development indicators at your fingertips, and enables you to visualize them using a dynamic scatterplotting system where each bubble represents a country…

Make sure you take the time to try the tool out. It has so many scales and variables that you can sort the data by, that you should never run out of fun or interesting combinations. One of my favorite things to do is create an data sort, and then use the “video” option at the bottom to watch how the countries in question have faired over time.

Chad's Internet and Economic Growth over the years

The graph I ran above (as a video) plotted the economic growth of Chad from 1976-2004 alongside the growth of internet users per 1000 people in that country.

Gapminder could be (is) a pretty powerful tool to study economic growth.