Contents

1. Widely-Used Compendia of Development Data
2. Health and Health Care Data
3. Data for Latin America and the Caribbean
4. Infant, Child, and Maternal Mortality
5. Family Planning
6. Vaccines and Immunizations
7. Undernourishment
8. Economic Affluence
9. Educational Attainment
10. Income Inequality
11. Income Pover
12. Water and Sanitation
13. Geographical Variables
14. Democracy, Constitutions, Civil and Political Rights, Women in Parliament
15. State Capacity
16. Free-Market Orientation

1. Widely-Used Compendia of Development Data

The World Bank World Development Indicators (“WDI”) are the most widely-cited data pertaining to economic and social development. The WDI include hundreds of variables pertaining to GDP per capita, income inequality, income poverty, mortality (adult, infant, maternal), life expectancy at birth, age at first marriage, fertility, population in different age groups, urban population, population density, contraceptive prevalence, birth attendance, doctors per capita, nurses per capita, hospital beds per capita, access to sanitation and safe water, immunization rates, adult illiteracy rates, HIV prevalence, etc.. Some indicators are disaggregated by gender, urban/rural, and so on. To use the WDI statistical compiler, (1) select a country or countries, then click “next”; (2) select variables (series), then click “next”; and (3) select years, then click “apply changes.”

The Quality of Government datasets housed at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden (but published in English), consists of about 2500 indicators on national quality of governance (as measured by such indicators as corruption, bureaucratic quality, democracy), some of its hypothesized causes (e.g., colonial origin, religion, and ethnolinguistic fractionalization), and some of its hypothesized consequences (e.g., GDP per capita, educational attainment, infant mortality, gender bias, environmental sustainability, life satisfaction, and trust). The indicators were compiled from about 100 sources. The Standard TS [time series] dataset has data on each indicator in each year from 1946 to 2016, provided a credible estimate can be found. The unit of analysis is the country-year — hence, Sweden-1946, Sweden-1947, and so on.

UNdata includes 33 regularly updated databases with more than 60 million separate pieces of information on such topics as “Agriculture, Crime, Education, Employment, Energy, Environment, Health, HIV/AIDS, Human Development, Industry, Information and Communication Technology, National Accounts, Population, Refugees, Tourism, and Trade.”

The Human Development Reports published annually by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) include a wide range of statistical data related to people’s ability to live a long and healthy life, acquire knowledge, and achieve a decent standard of living. Besides the Human Development Report Office’s annual global Reports covering all countries, associated agencies in most countries of the world have published national and subnational Human Development Reports. The Human Development Report 2010, the 20th Anniversary Edition, reaffirms the benefits of the whole 20-year project and tweaks significantly, with careful justification, the algorithms for calculating the major indices, including the Human Development Index. By 2015, however, some the 2010 revisions had been re-thought. A comparison of the technical notes of the 2013 and 2015 reports shows that in 2015 the two education sub-indices were combined using the arithmetic rather than the geometric mean, as had been the case before 2010; and that the “goalposts” for the health, education, and standard of living indices had gone back to being stipulated a priori (e.g., 85 for life expectancy, 15 for average years of schooling, etc.) rather than being set, in accordance with the 2010 revisions, to the highest and lowest actual levels across all countries, causing the “goalposts” to shift every year (which is not helpful for time-series analysis). You can access the Human Development Report data directly by visiting this website.

UNICEF has published State of the World’s Children annually since 1980. Each edition includes statistical data on indicators related to the well-being of children. UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey website has data on children and women, including updated infant and under-5 mortality statistics and access to recent survey reports and data.

The United Nations Population Division has a wide range of useful demographic data, some of which are accessible through this user-friendly data query system. The sex ratio by broad age groups (including the male-to-female ratio in the 0-4 age group, an important indicator of “missing girls”) is available here.

The Norwegian Social Science Data Services keeps current a useful MacroData Guide (in English) with links to state-of-the-art sources of cross-national data on demography, economics, education, health, labor and employment, crime, corruption, natural resources, politics, conflict, human rights, inequality, gender, religion, and other topics.

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2. Health and Health Care Data

The World Health Organization’s Global Health Observatory (GHO) has a large cross-national data repository, especially for years since 1990, on mortality, disease incidence, child nutrition, child health, maternal and reproductive health, immunization, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, water and sanitation), non communicable diseases and risk factors, health systems, environmental health, injuries, and violence.

3. Data for Latin America and the Caribbean

The Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean (SEDLAC), housed at the Center for Distributional, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS) at Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de La Plata, uses microdata from over 300 household surveys in 24 countries to produce comparable statistics on per capita income, income inequality, income poverty, household size, educational attainment, housing quality, durable goods ownership, access to electricity, safe water, and adequate sanitation, employment, and eligibility for disability and retirement pensions. Some of the variables are disaggregated by gender. The data pertain mostly to the period since 1990, but in some countries statistics go back as far as 1974. Country experts update the tables when microdata from a new survey become available, and new databases are published approximately twice per year. The website can be used in either English or Spanish.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), an agency of the World Health Organization, provides health data on 48 countries and territories in the Western Hemisphere, from Canada to St. Lucia to Argentina. The site includes a statistical compiler called Core Indicators – Interactive Version.

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5. Family Planning

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) have data on indicators of family planning.

Researchers associated with the Track20 project of Avenir Health (formerly the Futures Group) have used an expert rating system to measure family planning program effort in 60 poor developing countries. The researchers send questionnaires to country experts, aggregate the responses into component measures of different aspects of family planning effort, and assign each country an overall score equal to its achieved percentage of the maximum attainable score on the combined components. Surveys were done in 1972, 1982, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014, and more frequently since then.

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6. Vaccines and Immunizations

For Covid-19 vaccinations the OurWorldInData Covid-19 data explorer is reliable and extremely user-friendly.

In June 2000, researchers at UNICEF and the World Health Organization reviewed and evaluated all available immunization coverage information for as many countries as possible for as many years as possible from 1980 onward, seeking a “consensus estimate” of the share of a target population that had been immunized against a wide range of infectious diseases. To produce these estimates, they . The first estimates were released in 2001, Updated series are available at the World Health Organiation’s Global Health Observatory.

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7. Undernourishment

The World Health Organization (WHO) has data on infant and child undernourishment. Some countries have data spanning the early 1980s to the early 2000s. The sources of the data for each country are unusually well-described.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has compiled data for about 190 countries on the proportion of the total, adult, and child populations that suffer from hunger (less than the calorie requirement for an active and healthy life in a particular country), as well as on many other food and nutrition-related indicators (food needs; food, protein, and micronutrient availability; food trade; food aid). The data are described in an appendix to the annual The State of Food Insecurity in the World.

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8. Economic Affluence

The Penn World Table 10.0 has information on GDP in 183 countries for some or all of the years from 1950 to 2019. For studies comparing living standards across countries and over time, a particular GDP measure (RGDPe), expenditure-side real GDP at chained PPPs (in millions of 2017 US$),  is recommended.

The Maddison Project Database in its 2020 release provides statistics on population and real GDP per capita for most countries of the world from 1900 (data are available for 45 countries) to 2018 (data are available for 169 countries). Some countries have data for earlier years (indeed, data are available for 14 countries in the year 1 C. E.) The figures are given for purchasing power parity and are presented in constant 2011 dollars. For many countries the data go back much farther than 1950: data are available for 43 countries in 1940, for 45 countries in 1900, for 36 countries in 1850, for 19 countries in 1800, for 5 countries in 1000, and for 14 countries in the year 1 C.E. Regional estimates (for Western Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, etc.) are available for 2016, 2017, and 2018, as well as for every 10th year from 1820 to 2010.

As of early 2017 the World Bank World Development Indicators included 17 measures of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and 14 indicators of GNI (Gross National Income, formerly known as Gross National Product). The measures differ from one another on several dimensions, including (1) levels vs. growth rates, (2) total vs. per capita vs. per worker vs. per unit of energy use, (3) current US dollars vs. constant international dollars, and (4) market exchange rates vs. purchasing power parity. For studies comparing living standards across countries and over time, use GDP or GNI per capita figures in constant international dollars at purchasing power parity. As of early 2017 these variables were labeled “GDP per capita, PPP (constant 2011 international $)” and “GNI per capita, PPP (constant 2011 international $).” GDP is a measure of output; GNI is a measure of income. Among 149 countries with 2014 data on both of these indicators, the difference exceeded 10 percent in only 10 countries. In general, GNI is higher than GDP in countries that receive a lot of remittances from foreign workers (e.g., Philippines or Bangladesh) or that have (usually oil-funded) sovereign wealth funds that receive a lot of interest and dividends from investments in foreign countries (Timor Leste, Kuwait, Norway). Conversely, GDP is generally higher than GNI in countries that have high levels of foreign direct investment, often in oil or mineral extraction, and in which a large share of earnings flow back to the host country in the form of repatriated profits (Equatorial Guinea, Ireland, Mongolia, etc.). For the variables “GDP per capita, PPP (constant 2011 international $)” and “GNI per capita, PPP (constant 2011 international $),” data as of early 2017 were available only for the years 1990-2015. For earlier years, use the Penn World Table or Maddison Project data on GDP per capita in constant dollars at purchasing power parity.

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9. Educational Attainment

Data on average years of schooling and other measures of educational attainment, as well as the same indicators for females only and for males only, are available at www.barrolee.com for 146 countries at five year intervals from 1950 to 2015. A particularly useful indicator of educational attainment is “average years of total schooling” in Column “L” of the databases you can download at this site.. If you have access to the Journal of Development Economics, you can also consult an article describing the methods used to produce the data: Barro, Robert J., and Jong Wha Lee. “A new data set of educational attainment in the world, 1950–2010.” Journal of Development Economics 104 (2013): 184-198. A “Long-term Data” section of the Barro and Lee website includes “estimated school enrollment ratios from 1820 to 2010 and estimated educational attainment for the total, female and male populations from 1870 to 2010. The estimates are available in five-year intervals for 111 countries.”

For illiteracy, see the World Bank World Development Indicators and the UNDP Human Development Reports listed at the top of this page under “Major Statistical Compendia.”

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics has recent data on enrollment ratios, repetition rates, and other educational indicators for most of the world’s countries.

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10. Income Inequality

The World Inequality Database is the state of the art in providing high-quality data on income and wealth inequality, as well as on a variety of indicators of average and total production and income broken down in various ways. The database, which went public in 2015, has an exceptionally user-friendly web interface. Most previous estimates of income inequality have relied on survey data. The World Inequality Database combines survey data with national accounts statistics and income tax data. In most countries national accounts statistics and income tax data go back farther in time than survey data. The World Inequality Database methodology thus allows for for the production of a longer time series (especially in wealthier countries). Also, surveys notoriously underreport the incomes of the rich and the very rich; the other sources of data help to correct for this problem. Another distinctive advantage of this data source is that for some countries it provides information on wealth inequality as well as on income inequality (wealth is a stock, income is a flow).

A good source of national income inequality data for a large number of countries around the world is the World Income Inequality Database hosted by the World Institute of Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki. The May 6, 2020 version of the data set covers 200 countries with more than 11,000 observations from as recently as 2018. You’ll need the .pdf user guide as well as the Excel spreadsheet file.

The Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean (SEDLAC) based at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina calculates income inequality measures and poverty headcounts directly from survey microdata in each of 25 countries in the region. Although data for the 1980s and earlier is sparse, SEDLAC is a good source  for income inequality and income poverty data from Latin America from 1990 to the present.

A useful database of Gini coefficients (measures of income inequality) is Branco Milanovic’s All the Ginis. Gini coefficients range from 0 (everyone has the same amount of money) to 1 (one person has all the money, everyone else has none). You’ll need the description as well as the data. The link provides the data in Stata (.dta) format; if you would prefer Excel (.xlsx) I have converted the .dta file to .xlsx and stored it here. In cases where more than one Gini estimate exists for a given country-year, the “Giniall” column (Col. BD) indicates which one Milanovic finds most credible. The All the Ginis database does not use interpolation or extrapolation to fill in missing values, specifies the source from which each Gini was obtained, and indicates whether each Gini pertains to income or consumption (consumption Ginis tend to be lower) and, if it pertains to income, whether it registers the distribution of pre-tax-and-transfer or post-tax-and-transfer income (post-tax-and-transfer Ginis tend to be lower).

All the Ginis also indicates whether a particular Gini pertains to distribution across households or individuals. In the USA, the rich are less likely than the poor to be single, or single parents. So, rich households tend to be larger than poor households, which means that their higher incomes are divided among a larger number of people. This depresses the income share of rich individuals relative to rich households, and makes Ginis adjusted for household size (“equivalence adjusted”) lower than Ginis not so adjusted.  In poor countries, rich families tend to have fewer children than poor families. So, rich households tend to be smaller than poor households, which means that their higher incomes are divided among a smaller number of individuals. This increases the income share of rich individuals relative to rich households, and makes Ginis adjusted for household size (“equivalence adjusted”) higher than Ginis not so adjusted.

The Global Consumption and Income Project (GCID), initiated in April 2016, provides annual Gini coefficients for 160 countries (Lahoti, Jayadev, and Reddy 2016). Its website has a data visualization application showing time series for up to four countries from 1960 to 2015…when it works, which was not always the case when I tried it on a couple of different browsers. A distinctive feature of this database is that it separates Gini estimates based on income from Gini estimates based on consumption. It uses interpolation and extrapolation to fill in missing values. As of February 2017 they appeared still to be working out the kinks…the income series for South Korea is not plausible.

The strengths and weaknesses of the major compendia of data on income inequality are discussed in “Appraising Cross-National Income Inequality Databases,” a special issue of the Journal of Economic Inequality 13 No. 4 (December 2015).

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11. Income Poverty

This webpage is the gateway to the World Bank’s data on income poverty and income inequality. Particularly useful is the World Bank’s PovcalNet database. It includes “estimates of global poverty from 1981 to 2013 based on 2011 PPP [purchasing power parity]. The new poverty estimates combine Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) exchange rates for household consumption from the 2011 International Comparison Program with data from more than one thousand five hundred household surveys across 163 countries in the world, including 25 other high income countries. Over two million randomly sampled households were interviewed for the 2013 estimate, representing 85 percent of the population of the whole world.”

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12. Water and Sanitation

The WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation provides carefully collected data on the proportion of the population with access to safe water and adequate sanitation. The most detailed information is to be found in the country files, some of which contain estimates from as far back as 1980. In most cases, however, UNICEF considers data collected before 1990 as significantly lower in quality than data from 1990 forward.

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13. Geographical Variables

Data on land area, proportion of the population near the coast, latitude, population, and other such variables have been assembled by John Gallup, Andrew Mellinger, and Jeffrey Sachs. You can find data on these and other geographical variables in a section of the Dataverse at Harvard University (2010 version).

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14. Democracy, Civil and Political Rights, Women in Parliament, Constitutions

Varieties of Democracy Project

State-of-the-art in data on democracy and civil and political rights, as well as on many related indicators, have been compiled by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. V-Dem began data collection in 2012 and went public in 2016. Version 9 (May 2019) had 27 million observations coded by more than 3000 experts on 471 democracy-related indicators for 202 countries (V-Dem Institute 2019a). Multiple coders rated each indicator, and the V-Dem administrators used transparent methods to reconcile the ratings into country-year point estimates with uncertainty bands. In addition to hundreds of individual indicators related to democracy, V-Dem provides composite indices.

Among the most widely-used of V-Dem’s composite indices is the V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index, which consists of three terms weighted and summed:

(1) the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index (weighted 25 percent, bundles five components: popular elections, electoral integrity, suffrage breadth, freedom of association, and freedom of expression).

(2) the V-Dem Liberal Component Index (weighted 25 percent, consisting of 14 questions pertaining to equality before the law and individual liberty and 9 questions pertaining to judicial and executive constraints on the executive).

(3) the product of the Electoral Democracy and Liberal Component indices (weighted 50 percent).

Try the handy online analysis “country graph” and “variable graph.” Click “How To” in the upper right-hand corner of either page for instructions.

Prior to V-Dem, the most comprehensive dataset of quantitative democracy indicators was probably Polity IV, compiled by Ted Robert Gurr, Keith Jaggers, Monty Marshall, and their collaborators. The Polity IV data go back to a country’s date of independence or to 1800, whichever is more recent. Polity IV has transparent and detailed coding rules, uses multiple coders for each country-year, and tests for inter-coder reliability. To create the database, coders drawing on secondary literature assigned each of the world’s independent nations, in each year from 1800 to 2018, scores on “democracy” and “autocracy.” The number of countries coded ranged from 22 in 1800 to 167 in 2018. The scores are based on three sets of criteria: (1) “openness and competitiveness of the recruitment of the chief executive”; (2) “constraints on the authority of the chief executive”; and (3) “political participation and opposition.” Each criterion has subcomponents. For example, political participation and opposition includes “regulation of participation” (how much factionalism and personalism there is in politics) and “competitiveness of participation” (how much incumbents restrict political opposition). The subcomponents and components are scored, weighted, and combined to form a democracy score ranging from 10 to 0, as well as an autocracy score ranging from 0 to 10 (10 is the rating assigned to the most democratic democracy and to the most autocratic autocracy). The two scores are sometimes combined to form a “polity2” score ranging from 10 (most democratic) to -10 (most autocratic). Unlike the Democracy score, the polity2 score implies a penalty for more autocratic autocracy, as well as a premium for more democratic democracy. The coding is done transparently and systematically and is checked for inter-coder consistency.

Freedom House since 1972 has rated countries annually on “political rights” and “civil liberties.” Go here and scroll down to  “Freedom in the World Comparative and Historical Data.” One of the links under this heading allows you to download to your desktop an Excel spreadsheet titled “Country and Territory Ratings and Statuses,” which has the political rights and civil liberties time series for 195 countries and 15 territories from 1972 to present. The methodology by which the 2019 scores were produced is described here.

Descriptions and critiques of quantitative democracy indicators, including the Polity and Freedom House indicators,

Coppedge, Michael, et al. “V-Dem comparisons and contrasts with other measurement projects.” V-Dem Working Paper 45 (2017).

Doorenspleet, Renske (2018). “The Numerical Value of Democracy: League Tables, Scores and Trends.” Chapter 2 (29-68) in Renske Doorenspleet, Rethinking the Value of Democracy: A Comparative Perspective. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave McMillan.

Munck, Gerardo, and Jay Verkuilen, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Indices.” Comparative Political Studies 35 No. 1 (February 2002), 5-34. The article and commentary on it are available here if you or your institution subscribe to this journal.

Gender Quotas, Voter Turnout, Electoral Systems, etc.

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) has useful databases on voter turnout, electoral systems, gender quotas for national legislative seats, and other indicators related to elections and legislatures. Click here to access the databases.

Constitutions

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15. State Capacity

A World Bank webpage provides access to aggregate governance indicators for 212 countries for 1996-2007 for six dimensions of governance: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption.

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16. Free-Market Orientation

The Fraser Institute in Vancouver, BC, rates most countries of the world according to how closely each conforms to what the Institute defines as a free-market system. The data are at the Fraser Institute website.