"Towards supporting evidence-based decision making"

Focus, v. 35, no. 1, Fall 2015. Highlights of statistical resources available from the Center for Research Libraries

The Archive aims to preserve country statistical office and central bank websites that often contain ephemeral statistical data on topics such as economic conditions, population, education, housing, environmental conditions, transportation, health, social services, vital statistics, and more. Collected by Ivy Plus Libraries.

Global water information system, developed by the Land and Water Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Use "assets by country" interface to search by country and product

Editors: Jens Braarvi; Dag T. Haug; Frode Helland; Stephan Guth; University of Oslo, Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology.
A multilingual corpus of historically important texts and a resource to access the global history of concepts as displayed in a number of languages. It demonstrates how concepts diffuse historically into new languages, and thus into new cultural contexts. Sub-libraries include: Arabic texts; Biblia; Bibliotheca Polyglotta Graeca et Latina; Cuneiform multilinguals; Library of Old Norse; Motif library of mythology; Norwegian place names - Norske stedsnavn; Pāli Tipiṭaka; Sanskrit-Persica; The Ashoka library; The Kanjur Buddhist Sūtras in Tibetan; The multilingual Ibsen; Thesaurus Literaturae Buddhicae; Universal Declaration of Human Rights

ICPSR 7555. This data collection contains information gathered in five annual surveys that assessed the degree of freedom in 218 nations and dependencies from 1972-1976. The number of cases with data varies from year to year, due to annexation, amalgamation, or the addition of further territories to the roster. The data include assessments of the political and civil rights of the general population, an overall freedom rating for the country, and the direction in which this rating appeared to be moving. Surveys after 1972 have added variables that indicate whether a change in the evaluation since the previous survey was due to internal events in the country or to new information about existing conditions. Before 1973, only the presence or absence of change is noted. The 1976 data include four additional variables applicable to 142 cases and provide information about the system of government and the economy of most of the nations studied. The rationale used in assigning the seven categories on the continuum of most to least freedom can be found in Appendix III of the codebook, including which civil and political rights were considered critical in order for a nation to garner each rating. Requires free ICPSR account to access data.

A database of mortality and malnutrition rates - the most commonly used public health indicators of the severity of a humanitarian crisis. Field agencies use mortality and nutrition indicators to identify and measure the severity of needs in order to prioritize human and financial resources. Use Map and Timeline to select country specific data for Pakistan.

USAID-funded machine readable data. Subcategories include Democracy, Human Rights and Governance; Economic Growth; Education and Social Services; Health; Humanitarian Assistance; Peace and Security; Program Development and Oversight

Comprehensive data and analysis source for key topics in education such as access, completion, learning, expenditures and equity.

DevInfo database for monitoring human development. Indicators for education and Millennium development goals

EM-DAT contains essential core data on the occurrence and effects of over 18,000 mass disasters in the world from 1900 to present. The database is compiled from various sources, including UN agencies, non-governmental organisations, insurance companies, research institutes and press agencies. Includes disaster by country search interface.

Provides a regional perspective on development issues in Asia and the Pacific. The database, covering the 58 regional ESCAP Member States and Associate Members, contains 900 data series on a wide range of topics on population, education, health, poverty and inequalities, gender, economy, environment and connectivity. The online database is updated twice a year.

The annual global benchmark for publication of open government data, run by the Open Knowledge Network

International Labour Organization. The primary source for cross-country statistics on the labour market. The database contains over 100 indicators covering more than 230 countries and economies.

Pearson, Frederic S., and Robert A. Baumann, ICPSR06035-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1993. Documents all cases of military intervention across international boundaries by regular armed forces of independent states in the regions of Europe, the Americas (and Caribbean), Asia and the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East/North Africa. Military interventions are defined operationally in this collection as the movement of regular troops or forces (airborne, seaborne, shelling, etc.) of one country into the territory or territorial waters of another country, or forceful military action by troops already stationed by one country inside another, in the context of some political issue or dispute. The study seeks to identify politically important actions which interpose a state directly into the conflict patterns occurring in another state, and which conceivably involve a breach of the sovereignty of the target state. Requires free ICPSR account to access data.

Kisangani, Emizet F., and Jeffrey Pickering, Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2008-01-29. Documents 447 intervention events from 1989 to 2005. To ensure consistency across the full 1946-2005 time span, Pearson and Baumann's coding procedures were followed. Requires free ICPSR account to access data.

This file contains aggregate measures from the ARDA’s coding of the 2001, 2003, and 2005 U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Reports. This coding produced data on 196 different countries and territories (see below for list of countries coded), but excluded the United States. It also includes three indexes calculated from these data: Government Regulation of Religion index (GRI), Social Regulation of Religion index (SRI), Government Favoritism of Religion index (GFI) (see Grim and Finke, 2006). Data in this file represent mean coding responses for each variable from all three years of coding.

MAR tracks 284 politically-active ethnic groups throughout the world from 1945 to the present -- identifying where they are, what they do, and what happens to them. MAR focuses specifically on ethnopolitical groups, non-state communal groups that have "political significance" in the contemporary world because of their status and political actions.

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development

King, Gary; Lowe, Will, 2008. The data available here include almost 10 million individual events, each coded to the exact day they occur or become known. Each event is summarized in the data as "Actor A does something to Actor B", with Actors A and B recording about 450 countries and other (within-country) actors and "does something to" coded in an ontology of about 200 types of actions. The data are coded by computer from millions of Reuters news reports.

United Nations Office at Vienna. Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch, Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2010-07-22.
Surveys were distributed to officials in every member country of the United Nations. Designated officials completed the surveys to the best of their abilities given the country's available data.
Also available via UNOCDC site.

A central source for U.S. foreign assistance data, international socioeconomic data, and data-driven analysis. Links to data portals: Foreign Aid Explorer, International Data & Economic Analysis, Trade Capacity Building, Microenterprise Enterprise Reporting

A compilation of mortality data by age, sex and cause of death, as reported annually by Member States from their civil registration systems.

The United States Bureau of the Census initiated a series of studies on women in development in 1970 with data drawn primarily from national censuses, surveys, statistical abstracts, and international statistical compendia. The aim of this data series was to provide a reliable, up-to-date, accessible database on women in development which can illuminate the discrepancies in the roles and status of women against those of men throughout the world in order to serve as a basis for the promotion of both intranational and international parity between the sexes. The studies that comprise the Women in Development series consist of national-level data concerning female/male differentials over a range of demographic and socio-economic variables. Wherever possible, the data are broken down by age and urban/rural residence to facilitate further analysis. The series is cumulative and the data are presented in basic tabular format. Initially, the data tables were compiled for 69 developing nations from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Near East that were recipients of the United States Agency for International Development aid. The first collection, Women in Development, 1979-1980 (ICPSR 8053), included all the aid-recipient nations regardless of population size. Subsequently, data were compiled for all remaining nations of the world with a population of five million or more, and statistics for the original nations were updated to reflect more recent information. The second collection in the series, Women in Development IV, 1983 (ICPSR 8155), covered approximately 120 nations from Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Near East, North America, Europe, and the Soviet Union.

Select by date to access archived data. For the most recent data, see tables compiled by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and comparative data by country.

An ongoing effort to systematically gauge and track the perceptions and views of the World Bank Group’s clients and partners across the globe. This collection hosts open, accessible survey data from 29 countries collected in FY12 (July 2011 - June 2012) and 41 countries in FY13 (July 2012 - June 2013). In FY14 (July 2013 – June 2014), PORG will conduct surveys in another 43 countries. All data will be regularly updated and more countries will be added as data become available.

The Microdata Library is a service established to facilitate access to microdata that provide information about people living in developing countries, their institutions, their environment, their communities and the operation of their economies. It includes datasets that have been produced by the World Bank, such as impact evaluation of the Bank’s operations or research on development issues. It also includes datasets from other international organizations, statistical agencies and other agencies in low and middle-income countries.

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2011). Provides a comparable and up-to-date set of national data on contraceptive prevalence for almost all countries and areas of the world. It also provides estimates of unmet need for family planning.

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2012). Provides a comparable and up-to-date global set of survey-based data on contraceptive prevalence and unmet need for family planning and also presents model-based estimates and short-term projections of contraceptive prevalence, unmet need for family planning, total demand for family planning and percentage of demand for family planning that is satisfied.

The World Bank: indicators for 214 countries. Also available on CD-ROM (Lehman Data Service: CD-ROM HC59.69 .W683) for 1997, 1999-2001, 2003, 2005, 2007. Also available on ProQuest for 01/2009 to present.

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2009)

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2013)

United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) , Version 2.0c, May 2008. Collects and stores information on income inequality for developed, developing, and transition countries. The database and its documentation are available on this website.

Prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat. Free download in MS Excel format.

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Fertility and Family Planning Section

United Nations. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Population Division. Downloadable pdf format.

United Nations. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Population Division. Downloadable pdf format. Assesses changes in mortality risks at the global, regional and country levels, focusing in particular on the implementation period of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, from 1990-1995 to 2010-2015. The mortality estimates presented in this report are available in digital form. Electronic version web tool offers interactive access to the charts from the print version.

ICPSR 24340. Paxton, Pamela, Jennifer Green, and Melanie Hughes. This data collection provides information on women's inclusion in parliamentary bodies in over 150 countries from 1945 to 2003. The dataset allows for extensive, large-scale, cross-national investigation of the factors that explain women's attainment of political power over time and provides educators with comprehensive international and historical information on women in a variety of political positions. Information is provided on female suffrage, the first female member of parliament, yearly percentages of women in parliaments, when women reached important representational milestones, such as 10 percent, 20 percent, and 30 percent of a legislature, and when women achieved highly-visible political positions, such as prime minister, president, or head of parliament.

"The 2012 Revision of the World Population Prospects is the twenty-Third round of global demographic estimates and projections undertaken by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat."--from 14 April 2014 update. Also availalable in CD ROM format: Offsite CD-ROM HA155 .W682

Business CD-ROM HE7601 .W675 . 11th ed. (2007) Shelved in Business Course Reserves
13th ed 2009 Shelved in Business Course Reserves. Contains time series data for the years 1960, 1965, 1970 and annually from 1975 to 2013 for more than 150 telecommunication/ICT statistics covering fixed-telephone networks, mobile-cellular telephone subscriptions, quality of service, Internet (including fixed- and mobile-broadband subscription data), traffic, staff, prices, revenue, investment and statistics on ICT access and use by households and individuals. Selected demographic, macroeconomic and broadcasting statistics are also included.