This is the short edition of this week's more or less first broadcast on August 26th.

If you have listened to the long edition of this programme, you will already have heard this topic.

Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life,

and I'm Tim Harford.

Last year our producer Charlotte McDonald worked on an item about death row.

She spoke to Professor Carolyn Hoyle, director of the Center for Criminology at the University of Oxford in the UK, and heard that half the countries in the world today have abolished the death penalty, a sharp change in the last 18 years.

So if you look back to 1998, for example, only 35 countries had abolished the death penalty,

today 107 countries have abolished the death penalty.

And another 52 countries are what we call abolitionist de facto.

That means they haven't executed anyone in the last 10 years.

So they retain the death penalty on the books, but they're not actively using it.

So as of last year, only 39 countries executed anyone in the past 10 years.

Say that again, that's amazing.

Yeah, so going from a world where most countries were using the death penalty very frequently.

In the last 10 years only 39 countries executed anybody.

Gosh that is not very many at all actually.

It's not very many at all. There's been enormous change. That was Carolyn Hoyle talking to

Charlotte McDonald last year and since then Charlotte has been discovering there's more

of a story behind those figures.

That interview I did with Carolyn really stuck in my mind because I remember she was talking how

surprised I was at the really sharp decline in the number of countries that use the

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