Useful and Available Data Sources
Yasuyuki Todo
Professor
Department of International Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences
The University of Tokyo
Basic Cross-Country Data
PPP (Purchasing Power Parity)-adjusted GDP
- Penn World Tables
(Most widely used when comparing per capita income across countries and when calculating country-level TFP)
International Trade
- WTO'sInternational Trade Statistics
- UN comtrade
- UNCTAD-TRAINS
(Data on trade restrictions, such as tariffs and non-tariff measures)
- Jon Haveman's
International Trade Data (Useful to combine many types of trade data, such as trade volumes, distance between countries, tariffs, and prices.)
- GTAP's Data Bases (not free)
- IMF'sDirection of Trade Statistics (not free)
- Andrew Rose's Data Sets used in his papers
- World Bank's links to trade data
Foreign Direct Investment
Foreign Aid
- OECD's
CRS online (Data for each project, not only for each country or sector))
Institutions (Data on business regulations, corruption, and rule of law)
- World Bank's
Doing Business (Indicators for explicit and implicit regulations to do business)
- World Bank's
"Governance Matters" (Indicators for the level of governance and corruption)
Education
- UNESCO's
Data Centre
(Including R&D data)
-
Barro and Lee's education data
(Data on average years of schooling for each country, which is not available from UNESCO.
Widely used, but not updated since 2000.)
Poverty
- PovcalNet
(World Bank's estimates of poverty measures including the number of the poor
defined as people whose consumption (or income) is $1 (or $2) a day.)
Health
- Health and Nutrition: World Bank's
HNPStats
- Demographic and Health Surveys
(DHS) (Based on individual-level surveys in more than 75 countries and different time periods, some country-level data
on demographic and health are available for free.)
Climate and Environment
Other Cross-Country Data
- FAO's
RIGA
(Rural Income Generating Activities) Dataset
(Cross-country data for income from farm and nonfarm activities in rural areas)
- Inequality:
Xavier Sala-i-Martin's
"Evolution of the World Distribution of Income
(This is a program to graphically see the distribution of income in the world and in selected countries.
Click here (unavailable outside the campus) for the raw data.)
- Disaster: EM-DAT:
International Disaster Database (the number of disasters such as floods and famines)
- Population: UN's
World Urbanization Prospects
(including urban and rural population)
-
Data for Each Country
- Links to
statistical agencies
for many countries and international organizations (a site of Bureau of Labor Statistics, US)
World Bank's Datasets
- World Bank's
Research Datasets
(Numerous types of datasets used for the Bank's research and publicly available for free.)
Household-level Data
- Living Standards Measurement Survey
(World Bank's household survey in many countries. Available for research for free.)
- IFPRI's data sets
(International Food Policy Research Institute, one of the best research institutes on agriculture)
- BREAD's
(Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development)
links to data including household-level data
- GRIPS GCOE Program
(GRIPS, National Graduate Research Institute for Policy Studies, in Tokyo has a number of excellent development economists,
most notably Prof. Keijiro Otsuka. Their household-level data collected in some African countries are available upon request.)
Resources for household surveys (To those who are interested in doing your own household survey)
Firm-level Data
- World Bank's
Enterprise Surveys
(Firm-level data on 120,000 firms in 125 countries are available.)
Last revised: November 24, 2009