When the OECD met ggplot2

Click on the picture to see full size.

I wanted to have a go at some of the more advanced graphing available in R so that meant the ggplot2 which people keep going on about. I got the last 6 months growth figures off the OECD website for all the member countries that had produced the figures and kept throwing various combinations of R/ggplot2 code at it until I got what I wanted.

What I found was that like R with ggplot2 the learning curve is steep but it does give total control if you're prepared to spend the time on it. I still haven't worked out how to add the quartiles automatically but adding the horizontal lines I think worked better as I could make the outer ones dashed and finding the figures was easy enough quantile(GDP)

This is also the first time i've used R Studio and I have to say it's great perhaps I found it a little slow but it's such a pretty and helpful environment to work in I'm going to stick with it.

Anyway here is the code I ended up using.

ggplot(oecd2, aes(x=CC, y=GDP))
+ geom_text(aes(label=Country, x = CC, y = GDP),colour="black", size=5)
+ xlab("Country") + ylab("Growth as % GDP Change + Average & Quartiles")
+ opts(title = "Growth in OECD Countries (Q4 2010 - Q1 2011)")
+ geom_hline(yintercept=0.5,linetype=2)
+ geom_hline(yintercept=1.6,linetype=1)
+ geom_hline(yintercept=1.9,linetype=2)