"Research" with dozens of errors. Great thinking Brainiac. Much indebted.
GM-s per capita worldwide, 1. Iceland !

England is in wrong place because English population is that for entire britain
Wow. It is good to see that someone finally took the pains to independently check my data and update it.

Nice post! I found this map of it too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/5frfcu/world_map_of_chess_grandmasters_per_capita/

Nice post! I found this map of it too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/5frfcu/world_map_of_chess_grandmasters_per_capita/
It is a shame I was not at the technical level at the time to present my data as a graph like this ( also it did not occur to me to be honest ).
Nevertheless I like this post from the discussion of the graph:
Saying Andorra has 1.4 GMs per 100 000 citizens is like saying the Vatican has more than 2 popes per square mile. Technically correct.

Interesting stuff...
Wonder what the updated stats look like. India has around 55+ GM's now. Many new GM's since the updated statistics post in 2017, including Nihal Sarin and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu.

Sorry if I have made mistakes but I have compiled the list by hand ( from two sources: the FIDE list of countries by strength http://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml and the Wikipedia list of country populations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population ). I had to exclude some countries since for example FIDE believes that Scotland is a country while Wikipedia lists no such country.
So you included England but not Scotland?
Apart from clear mistakes, I see more "problems", as e.g. Groenland-Denmark, Spain-Catalonia-Galicia-Grenada, and what about England-UK-Scotland-Wales-Ireland-Guernsey-Gibraltar-Jersey-IsleOfMan... and the small ones as Vatican, Monaco, Lichtenstein have to be counted in a separate section, like the big ones, China, India etc.
But when we select in a correct way, yes, the great lines can be seen, in another forum here on Chess.Com someone mentioned the former Yugoslav countries and the former USSR countries, each with now a lot of fine chess players !! And on the other hand, we see countries or regio's that have to be helped, like our Max Euwe once tried to do !
Why wouldn't you count Galicia and Catalonia as a part of Spain? But, more importantly, why would you count Grenada as a country when it's not even an autonomous region?
Scotland indeed has a high number of GMs per capita. Roughly 1 ppm, which would have put it on the list around 30th place. As much as I admire Scotland, with regret I have to put forward that Scotland is not an independent country.
Here is why:
http://geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography/a/scotlandnot.htm