A Goldmine of Development Data Sources

Many colleagues are teaching aspects of development economics at this time of the year and a sunny Spring hat tip go Mark Seccombe for putting together this veritable goldmine of sources of data.

IMF Datamapper - You can choose individual countries of regions for comparison by a number of different economic criteria. Very useful site and all based on IMF rather than Wikipedia!

Worldmapper - Slightly bizarre but good fun. They resize countries depending on various criteria. Useful for getting a general idea about trade flows etc. although there a huge range of categories. Unfortunately the most recent data they have is 2002.

Nationmaster - a treasure trove of pretty much every piece of data imaginable. Most of them available as graphs and maps as well for comparison. Not as interactive as the datamapper but much more information. Sources are listed separately for each criteria.

Show/World - useful site that resizes countries according to certain criteria and enables a degree of interactivity. I’ve used it to get the pupils to suggest how they think the world will look after being resized and then playing the animation and discussing how accurate they were. Not a huge amount of choices in terms of criteria but what’s there is good.

WFP Procurement - click on the link icon in the text for an interactive graphic which outlines where the WFP procures food.

UN Aids - An interactive map containing information on policy usage and infection levels.

UN Cyberschoolbus - A graphing site where pupils can compare countries and regions.

Many thanks to Mark for these - can colleagues suggestions additions to the directory? We will happily add them to this blog entry.