PSA

There's a new data set that may be of interest to development-minded folks:

Do you want to know how much the U.S. invested in education in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2009? The Foreign Assistance Dashboard makes it easy to see and compare investments across sectors and countries at a glance. Civic-minded developers and researchers can download any and all of the Dashboard’s data in a machine-readable format to mash, visualize, and analyze U.S. budget data in new ways.

Today’s launch of the Foreign Assistance Dashboard is but a starting point for greater U.S. aid transparency. In the months to come, the Dashboard will grow beyond State and USAID to include data from all Federal agencies that provide foreign assistance. In addition, more granular and timely data will enable users to drill down to the details of specific projects and track trends. With time, the Dashboard will illuminate not only dollars spent but also the impact of our investments. Ultimately, government-wide collection of featured high-value data will be institutionalized through guidance from the Office of Management and Budget.

Rosling on the Beeb

We've featured Hans Rosling and his cool data visualizations on this blog multiple times. Now he's got his own BBC show, "The Joy of Stats", which airs on December 7th on BBC4. Unfortunately, it does not appear that it will be shown outside the UK, but here is the preview:



(ht: The Economist Daily Charts blog)

Visualize the World

The World Freedom Atlas is a nice interactive online tool for visualizing a lot of measures relevant to social scientists, students, and journalists. It includes common variables used in Poli Sci research like Polity IV, Freedom House, UNDP Development Report, and World Bank measures, as well as measures from influential research like BdM et al's selectorate theory, Henisz's political constraints, Fearon's ethnic fractionalization, Easterly and Levine's ethnolinguistic fractionalization, and many others. It covers 1990-2006, and the interface is quick and easy. Apparently it was created by a student as part of a project for a geography class at the University of Wisconsin. I'd recommend playing around with it for a bit. It's really cool.

(via Ali Stoyan)

Rosling Talks to TED (Again)

Hans Rosling's TED talks are always fun, and we've hyped them repeatedly here. Well, he's got a new one on the Millennium Development Goals.



Via Aid Watch.

FYI, Again

Another new dataset that might be of some interest to readers: The National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy series:

The National Elections across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) dataset provides detailed information on all election events from 1960-2006. To be included, elections must be for a national executive figure, such as a president, or for a national legislative body, such as a parliament, legislature, constituent assembly, or other directly elected representative bodies. In order for an election to be included, voters must directly elect the person or persons appearing on the ballot to the national post in question. Voting must also be direct, or "by the people" in the sense that mass voting takes place. That voting is "by the people" does not imply anything about the extent of the franchise: some regimes may construe this to mean a small portion of the population. However, when voting takes place by committee, institution or a coterie, the "election" is not included. By-elections are not counted as elections for the purpose of this project, unless they take the form of midterm elections occurring within a pre-established schedule. In federal systems, only elections to national-level bodies are included. Cases in which any portion of the seats in a national legislative body are filled through voting are included.

Beyond these basic requirements, elections may or may not be competitive, and may have any number of other ostensible flaws. In fact, this last feature of the dataset is what separates NELDA most clearly from other available datasets on elections.

That's from the overview. The actual data (in STATA and Excel formats) requires filling out a form here. There appears to be a glitch in the form right now, whereby "Other" is the only category of user that actually allows you to download the data.

UPDATE: Forgot to ht Monkey Cage.

FYI

A new data set that might be of interest to some readers: the World Treaty Index. It's in its beta version, and currently includes all international treaties between 1945 and 1997. By year's end they promise to add the rest of the 20th century. It's searchable by country, dyad, and year. Looks interesting.

HT to @drewconway on Twitter.

PSA

The World Bank's World Development Indicators data set is now free and open to the public. To celebrate, somebody put together this handy graphing tool that will plot any series in the set. Pretty cool.

(ht to someone in my RSS feed. Sorry, but I don't remember who.)

New Stata Data Repository

From Alex Tabarrok at MR:

Even when every dataset is nicely formatted and documented it can be time consuming to merge two or more datasets when, for example, they use different identifiers for countries.

Giulia Catini, Ugo Panizza and Carol Saade have started a Macro Data 4 Stata repository which collects and creates common identifiers for the Penn World Tables, Barro and Lee's Educational data, the World Bank's Development Indicators and about 20 other datasets commonly used in macroeconomics. Any dataset in the repository can be merged with any other with just a couple of standard commands.

Check it out and please do add your own data!

This seems like it's going to be a great tool for data searching and merging from a wide range of datasets. The repository is being built using STATA 10 and 11 so if you don't have a realtively recent version of the software, you'll have to track one down.