DEVECONDATA

AfriPop

2012-02-07T07:44:00.000-08:00

AfriPop is "gridded spatial population datasets showing age composition by 5-year groupings and gender." As of February 2012, the data for under-5 children and women of age 15-49 are available.

Statistik Industri

2012-01-23T07:48:00.000-08:00

An annual panel data of medium and large plants (more than 20 employees) in Indonesia.

Used by Amiti and Konings (2007). Also by Michael Peters (2011) "Heterogeneous Mark-Ups and Endogeneous Misallocation" and Mu-Jeung Yang (2011) "Micro-level Misallocation and Selection: Estimation and Aggregate Implications".

IHME Development Assistance for Health Database 1990-2008

2012-01-10T05:20:00.000-08:00

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has compiled the cross-country panel data on foreign aid to the health sector. See Ravishankar et al. (2009) for detail. In particular, this dataset contains aid not only from governments but also from the Global Fund and private philanthropy.

PETS/QSDS Data Portal

2011-12-20T01:24:00.000-08:00

PETS (Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys) and QSDS (Quantitative Service Delivery Surveys) are the two major surveys by the World Bank on public service delivery in education and health. PETS/QSDS Data Portal disseminates survey instruments and results.

See Reinikka and Svensson (2004) for more detail on the PETS surveys.

(HT: Mounir Karadja)

Ethnic Diversity

2011-12-06T02:21:00.000-08:00

See Section 5.2 of Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) for a survey of different measures of ethnic diversity. For more recent discussions in relation to civil wars, see Cederman and Girardin (2007) and Fearon, Kasara, and Laitin (2007).

1. Ethnolinguistic fragmentation index

First brought into economics by Mauro (1995)

See Easterly and Levine (1997), whose dataset is available here.

Criticised by Alesina et al. (2003), Fearon (2003), and Posner (2004).

2. Ethnic fractionalization index

Proposed by Alesina et al. (2003)

Found to be robustly correlated with the degree of insulation of political leader (see Aghion et al. 2004)

Criticised by Posner (2004) (see footnote 10)

3. Linguistic fractionalization index

Proposed by Alesina et al. (2003)

4. Ethnic polarization index

Proposed by Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005a), who apply the polarization index proposed by Esteban and Ray (1994), and shown to be correlated with incidence of civil wars.

The dataset is available at American Economic Review website (see Montalvo and Reynal-Querol's article).

Also found to be correlated with the degree of insulation of political leaders by Aghion et al. (2004)

5. Linguistic heterogeneity index (updated on 24 Nov and 6 Dec 2011)

Desmet, Ortuno-Ortin, and Wacziarg (2012) propose a measure of linguistic diversity at different levels of linguistic aggregation, based on language trees from the Ethnologue data. The data is available from Wacziarg's website (click Research).

Esteban, Mayoral, and Ray (2011) use the same Ethnologue data to calculate the distance between two linguistic groups for obtaining a polarization index that is more general than the one by Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005) described above (in which the distance between any two groups is set to be one).

6. Proportion of the population in African countries whose ethnic group lives in other countries as well

Constructed by Englebert (2000)

Treated as the measure of legitimacy of African states over their population

Data and codebook is downloadable at Englebert's website.

World Migration Matrix, 1500-2000

2011-11-24T05:02:00.000-08:00

Constructed by Louis Putterman and his colleagues.

See this page for details.

Michalopoulas (2012) "The Origins of Ethnolinguistic Diversity" uses this data to identify countries in which more than 40% of the current population can trace ancestry within the same country boundary back to 1500 AD, for which variation in agricultural suitability and elevation is found to be a strong predictor of ethnic diversity

Restrictions on firm size in India

2011-11-22T14:08:00.001-08:00

Mohan (2002) lists the industries in which the Indian government restricted the size of firms.

Used by Hsieh and Klenow (2009) to show that industries with size restriction have more variation in the marginal revenue product at the plant level.

Social Networks Data by Banerjee, Chandrasekar, Duflo, and Jackson

2011-11-06T03:53:00.001-08:00

See Esther Duflo's webpage.

RCT survey data depositories

2011-11-04T09:03:00.000-07:00

The J-PAL and the World Bank make public the survey data collected for randomized control trials in their respective data depository website: J-PAL Dataverse and Impact Evaluation Microdata Catalogue. (HT: Markus Goldstein)

Chinese state-owned enterprise data

2011-10-24T06:24:00.000-07:00

Manski, Qian and Xu (2000) use a data of 520 Chinese state-owned enterprises from 1986 to 1991, collected by the China System Reform Research Institute in Beijing, to see if the output is more correlated within regions than within industrial sector (which theoretically leads to the desirability of M-form organization than U-form).

Banking/Financial Crisis Episodes

2011-10-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

The most comprehensive data on banking crises is given by Reinhart and Rogoff (2008), covering the period going back to 1800. See Carmen Reinhart's website for detail.

Demirguc-Kunt and Detragiache (2005) report the years of banking crisis across countries during 1980-2002. See Table 2 for raw data.

Laeven and Valencia (2008) "Systemic Banking Crises: A New Database" (IMF Working Paper Working Paper No. 08/224) present a database on the timing of systemic banking crises and policy responses to resolve them during 1970-2007.

Data Collection Methods

2011-10-18T05:36:00.000-07:00

STICERD Fieldwork in Development Economics, managed by Markus Goldstein, provides resources useful for doing fieldworks.

Martinelli and Parker (2007) "Deception and Misreporting in a Social Program" provide caution against using self-reporting information on the ownership of status goods (goods that many other people own).

De Mel, McKenzie, Woodruff (2008) provide guidance for measuring microenterprise profits.

Svensson (2003) provides the way to solicit information on bribe payments. See section III.

Delavande, Gine, and McKenzie (2010) discuss how to solicit subjective expectations (such as expected return to schooling) from people in developing countries.

Development Impact, the blog by four World Bank economists working on randomized control trials, often reports the studies in which the data collection methods are randomly assigned.

April 26, 2011: when interviewing a household member privately is good and when it is bad
April 27, 2011: what method of consumption expenditure survey is the best
October 11, 2011: how labor supply should be measured for farmers
October 18, 2011: how access to financial services (bank accounts, insurance, etc.) should be measured.

Financial Development

2011-10-17T07:20:00.000-07:00

Private credit over GDP seems to be the currently accepted measure of financial development.

Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Levine (2000) "A New Database on Financial Development and Structure," World Bank Economic Review 14, pp. 597-605, provides such data available on a World Bank webpage.

Used by Ross Levine, Norman Loayza, and Thorsten Beck (2000) “Financial Intermediation and Growth: Causality and Causes” Journal of Monetary Economics, 46, pp. 31-77.

Also used by Aghion, Howitt, and Mayer-Foulkes (2005) and Aghion and Marinescu (2006).

If this measure is used in country fixed effects estimation, it may capture business cycle rather than the degree of financial development.

Rajan and Zingales (1998) prefer using the index of accounting standards by the Center for International Financial Analysis and Research (CIFAR) in 1983 and in 1990 as the measure of financial development. See the fifth column in Table 4 for why.

National Family and Health Survey (NFHS)

2011-10-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

The National Family and Health Surveys (NFHS) are India's Demographic and Health Surveys.

Used by Oster (2006) to investigate the effect of access to health facilities on gender inequality in child health investments.

Jayachandran and Kuziemko (2011) use the 1992, 1998, and 2005 waves to show that breastfeeding duration is shorter for girls because the mother wants to have a son (and thus stops breastfeeding in order to get pregnant again).

Kenyan Life Panel Survey (KLPS)

2011-09-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

Quote from Baird, Hicks, Miguel, and Kremer:

A midterm round (KLPS-1) was conducted in 2003-05.

The Kenyan Life Panel Survey (KLPS-2) was collected during 2007-2009, and tracked a representative sample of approximately 7,500 respondents who had been enrolled in primary school grades 2-7 in the 75 PSDP schools at baseline in 1998.

See the survey webpage for more detail.

Armed Conflict Database

2011-09-21T04:09:00.000-07:00

The data is freely available here along with the codebook etc.

Miguel et al. (2004) popularize the use of this dataset for measuring civil wars among economists. See this paper for why this dataset may be better than the COW data.

Most recently used by Besley and Persson (2011).

Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive

2011-09-21T04:05:00.000-07:00

Compiled by Arthur Banks.

The variable on purges is used by Besley and Persson (2011).

Capital depreciation rate

2011-09-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

See Schundeln (2007) "Appreciating Depreciation: A Note on Physical Capital Depreciation in a
Developing Country" for the estimates of capital depreciation rate in Indonesia.

Sri Lanka Microenterprise Survey (SLMS)

2011-09-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

Panel surveys of microenterprises (invested capital of about 1000 US dollars or less) in Kalutara, Galle, and Matara districts of Sri Lanka, conducted quarterly from April 2005 to April 2007.

See section II.A of de Mel et al. (2008) for detail.

Data on international migration

2011-09-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

See Section 2.1 of

Gordon H. Hanson, "International Migration and the Developing World." In Dani Rodrik and Mark Rosenzweig (eds.): Handbook of Development Economics, Vol. 5 (The Netherlands: North-Holland, 2010), pp. 4363-4414.

for a survey on the datasets on international migration.

Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT)

2011-09-01T05:05:00.000-07:00

EM-DAT catalogues disasters around the world since 1900. See the explanatory note for the definition of a disaster etc.

To make a request for raw data, click "Database" and then "DISASTER LIST", and follow the instructions.

Although it is primarily a cross-country data set, it contains the name of sub-national regions affected by disasters. By geo-referencing them, the data can become a sub-national one. This presentation slide discusses issues in geo-referencing the EM-DAT data.

Used by Stromberg (2007). Besley and Persson (2011) use this data to construct an exogenous shock to the real wage or the opportunity cost of labor.

POLITY IV

2011-09-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

Downloadable at http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity/

Kristian Gleditsch's Polity Data Archive for older versions of POLITY dataset. See also Will H. Moore's Polity Data Page.

Variable POLITY2 is widely used by researchers on the cause and effect of democracy. For criticism on this aggregate variable, see Gleditsch and Ward (1997) "Double Take: A Reexamination of Democracy and Autocracy in Modern Polities," Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41(3): 361-383.

Variable EXCONST is used as the measure of "limited government", hence secure property rights, by Acemoglu and Johnson (2005). Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) show that this variable in year 1900 or the year of independence is correlated with Political Risk Service's measure of secure property rights and European settlers' mortality (see Table 3 of Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson (2001) "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation," American Economic Review, 91(5), pp.1369-1401). Besley and Persson (2011) use this variable to measure the degree to which the group of citizens in power cannot exclude the opposition groups in the allocation of government spending. See Glaeser et al. (2004) for criticism against the use of this variable as a measure of institutions.

Variable PARCOMP is found to be the main driving force for democracy to have higher manufacturing wages (see Rodrik 1999, section IV).

Variable DURABLE is used by Smith (2004) to examine whether oil wealth enhances or undermines regime durability.

If you use variable REGTRANS, be careful. The description in the codebook may be different from how the variable is actually coded in the data file. See page 53 of Jong-A-Pin and de Haan (2008, Econ Journal Watch).

Timor-Leste Transparency Portal

2011-08-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.transparency.gov.tl/public/index

It doesn't seem to work properly yet, but maybe in the near future...

Bulletin Board on Statistical Capacicty

2011-08-04T20:28:00.000-07:00

The cross-country data on the capacity of government statistical systems, available for 145 countries in 1999 and from 2004 onwards

http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/bulletin-board-on-statistical-capacity

INDEPTH

2011-06-20T02:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.indepth-network.org/

Townsend-Thai data

2011-05-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

http://cier.uchicago.edu/data/

Recently used by Gine (2011).

Vietnam Statistical Yearbooks

2011-05-18T05:37:00.000-07:00

Data on provincial population in 1985-2000 and on total state investment flows by province in 1976-1985 from Vietnam Statistical Yearbooks are used by Miguel and Roland (2011).

Vietnam Living Standards Surveys

2011-05-18T04:48:00.000-07:00

Conducted in 1992-93 and 1997-98. The 1993 sample is nationally representative. 4710 of these original households are re-interviewed in 1997-98, forming a panel. Detailed measures of household consumption and expenditures are available.

Used by O'Donnell, Lopez-Nicolas, and van Doorslaer (2008).

Used also by Miguel and Roland (2011) for per capita consumption expenditure at the provincial level.

Vietnam 1999 Population and Housing Census

2011-05-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

Used by Miguel and Roland (2011) for the data on access to electricity and literacy.

Downloadable at IPUMS International.

Vietnam district-level povery estimate in 1999

2011-05-18T04:41:00.000-07:00

See Nicholas Minot, Bob Baulch and Michael Epprecht (2003) Poverty and inequality in Vietnam: spatial patterns and geographic determinants (IFPRI and Institute of Development Studies) for how it is estimated.

Used by Miguel and Roland (2011).

Cshapes

2011-05-09T08:11:00.000-07:00

Created by Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Doreen Kuse, and Nils Weidmann, Cshapes is a historical GIS vector data of national boundaries (and the location of capital cities) since 1945. Available on Weidmann's website.

Political Terror Scale

2011-05-07T04:49:00.000-07:00

Political Terror Scale measures the degree (in 5-point scale) of human rights abuse in each country annually for the period 1976-2009, based on two sources: Amnesty International and US State Department.

Papers using this dataset are listed here. In addition, Qian and Yanagizawa (2009) investigate what causes the divergence between the two reports, Amnesty International and US State Department.

Populsat

2011-05-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.populstat.info/

Sub-national historical population data by Jan Lahmeyer.

Primitive Technology Dataset

2011-04-29T00:50:00.000-07:00

Diego Comin, William Easterly, and Eric Gong (2010) have compiled the historical cross-country data on the degree of technology adoption in agriculture, transportation, communication, military and industry at three points in time: 1000 B.C., 0 A.D. and 1500 A.D.

See Diego Comin's website for the documentation and the data.

Used by Putterman and Weil (2010) as an alternative measure of early development.

Agricultural Transition Dataset

2011-04-27T05:23:00.000-07:00

Louis Putterman has compiled a cross-country data on the year in which agriculture began. Downloadable here.

Used by Chanda and Putterman (2007) and Putterman and Weil (2010).

Elevation

2011-04-13T04:53:00.000-07:00

GTOPO30

Developed by the U.S. Geological Survey's Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) in 1996, GTOPO30 provides elevations at the 30 arc seconds (roughly 1km) grid level. See the USGS/EROS website for detail.

GTOPO30 was used by Deininger and Minten (2002), Nunn and Puga (2007) to measure the degree of ruggedness of the earth surface of each country, and Duflo and Pande (2007) to calculate river gradient in India.

SRTM3 / SRTM30

SRTM3 is an updated version of GTOPO30 (I suppose) at a higher spatial resolution of 3 arc-seconds (roughly 100m). SRTM30 is a version that aggregates SRTM3 to the 30 arc second resolution. See the USGS/EROS website for more details. SRTM30 is supposed to be better than GTOPO30 (see the description of SRTM30 on this page).

For SRTM3 (version 2.1), the data is available here and the documentation is available here. For SRTM30 (version 2.1), both the data and the documentation is available here.

SRTM30 has been widely used by economists: Taryn Dinkelman's working paper "The Effects of Rural Electrification on Employment: New Evidence from South Africa" (to create an instrument for electricity grid placements); Melissa Dell's working paper (now published in Econometrica) "The Persistent Effects of Peru's Mining Mita" (to create control variables); Acemoglu and Dell's paper forthcoming in AEJ Macro "Productivity Differences Within and Between Countries" (to calculate the distance to paved roads that takes into account elevation); Olken (2009) (to obtain the strength of TV signals in each sub-district of Indonesia); and Yanagizawa (2009) "Propaganda and Conflict: Theory and Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide".

How to use GTOPO30 / SRTM30 in ArcGIS

Here is the tip for "How to import GTOPO30 or SRTM30 data into ArcMap (for ArcGIS 9.x)". Step 7 should be skipped because the SRTM30 version 2 uses the value 0 (instead of -9999) for the ocean (see section 1.2 of the documentation).

TerrainBase
Elevation data is also available by TerrainBase, constructed by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and U.S. National Geophysical Data Center (downloadable at the Atlas of Biosphere). This one is used by Michalopoulos (2008). It is not clear if this is the same as, better or worse than, GTOPO30 and SRTM30. However, if the study area is the whole globe, this data is easier to use because it comes in one file. (GTOPO30 and SRTM30 are provided in several files each of which covers a part of the whole globe.)

Young Lives

2011-04-11T08:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.younglives.org.uk/

The data is used by Helmers and Patnams (2011).

Mexico 2000 Population and Housing Census

2011-04-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

For a sample of households, the data on remittances is collected. This data is used by Demirguc-Kunt et al. (2011).

Tajik Living Standards Surveys (TLSS)

2011-04-11T07:40:00.000-07:00

The 1999 and 2003 surveys were used by Shemyakina (2011), to estimate the impact of civil conflict on educational attainment of girls.

Work and Iron Status Evaluation (WISE)

2011-04-11T07:28:00.000-07:00

See Duncan Thomas's website for details.

Its consumption expenditure and price data is used by McKelvey (2011) to check the validity of unit value as a proxy for price.

NDVI

2011-04-08T04:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.glcf.umd.edu/data/gimms/

Data on land rights in Africa

2011-04-05T04:52:00.000-07:00

Fenske (2011) compile the list of (and analyze) datasets on land rights in Africa. See its web appendix for the list (available on the author's website).

Cape Area Panel Survey

2011-04-05T04:46:00.000-07:00

www.caps.uct.ac.za

Used by Lam et al. (2011).

Microfinance Institution Data

2011-04-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

The Mix Market makes available the data on microfinance institutions around the world.

Used by Ahlin et al. (2011).

Genetic Distance Data

2011-03-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

Downloadable at Enrico Spolaore's website.

White's (1983) vegetation map of Africa

2011-03-30T02:07:00.000-07:00

http://gcmd.nasa.gov/records/GCMD_GNVd0031_104.html

Used by James Fenske's working paper entitled "Ecology, Trade and States in Pre-Colonial Africa" to show that ecological diversity led to the emergence of states in pre-colonial Africa.

List of household panel data

2011-03-29T02:15:00.000-07:00

Bob Baulch at Chronic Poverty Research Centre compiles the list of household panel data in developing and transition countries.

HT: Koen Deconinck

Reconstruction of global land use and land cover AD 800 to 1992

2011-03-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

http://dx.doi.org/10.1594/WDCC/RECON_LAND_COVER_800-1992

See Pongratz et al. (2007) for how the data is constructed.

Travel time to major cities

2011-03-20T09:11:00.001-07:00

http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/index.htm

Shipping Lane

2011-03-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

In the commercial activity layer of the Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems, you can find shipping lanes across the globe.

Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems

2011-03-20T09:06:00.001-07:00

http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/globalmarine

HydroSHED

2011-03-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

HydroSHED provides not only the location of rivers (see this post) and water bodies (see this post) but also the direction of water flow.

Developed by the Conservation Science Program of World Wildlife Fund (WWF), in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and the Center for Environmental Systems Research (CESR) of the University of Kassel, Germany.

The documentation and the data can be downloaded at USGS's website.

Water bodies (lakes etc.)

2011-03-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Global Lakes and Wetlands Database (GLWD)

Developed by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in partnership with the Center for Environmental Systems Research, University of Kassel, Germany. Downloadable at the WWF's website.

SRTM Water Body Data (SWBD)

Created by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) as a by-product of SRTM elevation data (see this post). The data is available here as thousands of shapefiles, each of which contains 1 by 1 degree area.

Natural Earth

Natural and artificial lake polygons can be obtained from the Lakes + Reservoirs data of Natural Earth.

VMap0

2011-03-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

The Vector Map Level 0 (VMap0) is released by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) in 1997. It is an updated and improved version of the Digital Chart of the World (DCW). See Wikipedia's entry on the history of Vmap0 data.

It is downloadable (along with documentation) at mapAbility.com.

CIA World DataBank II

2011-03-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

CIA World DataBank II

"is a collection of world map data, consisting of vector descriptions of land outlines, rivers, and political boundaries. It was created by the U.S. government in the 1980s and has a nominal scale of 1:5,000,000."(Quoted from http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/sources.htm)

The text file version converted by Dave Page is available on this website.

Geographic data from World DabaBank II is updated by Natural Earth.

Railway network

2011-03-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

VMap0 offers the spatial data on global railway networks. See this post on VMap0.

Cross-country data on the number of religions

2011-03-18T03:33:00.000-07:00

Barrett, D. B., Kurian, G. T. & Johnson, T. M. 2001

World Christian Encyclopedia 2nd edition (by Barrett et al., Oxford University Press, 2001) provides the number of religions in each country. The digitized version appears to be available at World Christian Database (which requires subscription).

Used by Fincher and Thornhill (2008) to investigate if infectious diseases predict the variety of religion in a country.

History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE)

2011-03-17T06:53:00.000-07:00

The History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) provides population and land use data at the 5 arc-minute spatial resolution for the last 12,000 years.

For the population data, see Goldewijk et al. (2010) for the methodology used in version 3.1 (the latest version as of April 2011). The primary sources of historical population counts at the national level for HYDE 3.1 include:

World Atlas of Population History by McEvedy and Jones (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1978) (see this post for the application of this data in economics research)

A Concise History of World Population by Livi-Bacci (4th edition, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007)

For the data source of sub-national level population counts, see the description in Goldewijk (2005).

Used by Bluedorn et al. (2009).

Political Instability Task Force

2011-03-17T02:27:00.000-07:00

http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/

Global Terrorism Database

2011-03-17T02:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/

SCAD

2011-03-17T02:18:00.000-07:00

The Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD), compiled by the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, includes information on over 6,000 protests, riots, strikes, coups, communal violence, and other types of social unrest in African countries with population more than 1 million since 1990. The SCAD excludes civil war events. (HT: Mounir Karadja)

Agricultural price distortions

2011-03-16T08:18:00.000-07:00

The Political Economy of Agricultural Pricing Policy (Volume 4): A Synthesis of the Economics in Developing Countries by Maurice Schiff and Alberto Valdes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) provides agricultural tax rates by crop for various developing countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ghana, South Korea, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Philippines, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, Zambia) annually from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s. See Appendix of the book.

As an update to this study, Anderson and Valenzuela (2008) at the World Bank estimate 30 commodity-specific indicators of the policy-induced divergence between domestic and international prices in 68 countries since 1955. This data is used by Block (2010) to explain the agricultural total factor productivity in sub-Saharan Africa.

Agricultural research expenditure in Africa since 1971

2011-03-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

IFPRI's Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) Initiative collected agricultural research expenditures for 27 sub-Saharan African countries since 1971, downloadable at www.asti.cgiar.org/data.

Used by Block (2010), to explain the agricultural total factor productivity in sub-Saharan Africa.

G-Econ Database

2011-03-10T01:30:00.000-08:00

Geographically based Economic data (G-Econ) (by William Nordhaus and others at Yale University) assemble "Gross Cell Products" for each of the 1 by 1 degree cells on the earth. For countries with poor subnational economic data, they rely on population census and national output per capita by agriculture and by non-agriculture.

Used by Pelle Ahlerup and Ola Olsson (2007) "The Roots of Ethnic Diversity" SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, ECONOMICS AND LAW, GÖTEBORG UNIVERSITY, Working paper 281.

ISRIC soil data

2011-03-06T08:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.isric.org/UK/About+Soils/Soil+data/

The ISRIC-WISE (World Inventory of Soil Emissions Potential) dataset is used by FAO's AEZ project.

For Latin America, SOTERLAC version 2.0 is available and downloadable here. Used by Dell (2010).

For Africa, European Digital Archive of Soil Maps (EuDASM) has digitized paper soil maps to produce The Soil Maps of Africa.

Peru 1994 Agricultural Census

2011-03-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

Dell (2010) uses Peru's 1994 agricultural census for whether households sell part of their produce in markets and whether household members are employed outside their farm.

Population Census in Peru

2011-03-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

Dell (2010) uses Peru's population census in 1876, 1940, and 1993 to calculate the correlation of district-level population across time. Footnote 17 of Dell (2010) says that the 2005 population census was methodologically flawed. Dell (2010) also uses the 1876 census for the literacy rate, the 1940 census for years of schooling, and the 1993 census for whether primary occupation is agriculture.

ENAHO

2011-03-06T05:29:00.000-08:00

The ENANO (Encuesta Nacional de Hogares) is an annual household survey conducted by the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica e Informacion, Peru's national statistical agency.

The 2002 and 2003 surveys are used by Hunt (2007) to investigate whether crime victims are more likely to pay bribes.

The 2001 survey is used by Dell (2010) to measure household consumption as living standards, net of transfers and normalized to Lima metropolitan prices; ethnicity (the language spoken in the household);

Afrobarometer Surveys

2011-02-26T07:19:00.000-08:00

Afrobarometer is a collection of surveys on African citizens' attitudes to democracy, markets, and civil society.

Data is downloadable from the Survey website.

See this webpage for its coverage of countries and years.

For types of questions asked, see here. Data on informal insurance (in a crude way, though) is available.

As a nationally representative sample of the voting age population is interviewed (see here), the surveys can also be used for sub-national demographic statistics such as education level, ethnicity, etc.

For studies using this survey data for analyzing ethnicity and politics, see Miguel and Posner (2006) and Norris and Mattes (2003). Nunn and Wantchekon (2010) use this data to test whether ethnic groups that exported slaves more in the past trust other people less.

Mexican Employment Survey (ENE)

2011-02-14T04:48:00.000-08:00

The dataset is used by Bruhn and McKenzie (2010) in their simulation of which randomization methods perform the best.

LEAPS Project

2011-02-14T04:41:00.000-08:00

The LEAPS project has been collecting school quality data from the Punjab province of Pakistan. The data from the first wave is publicly available for free. The second wave will be available by the end of year 2010. See Andrabi et al. (2009) "Do Value-added Estimates Add Value?" for detail.

The education sector in Pakistan is characterized with many poor quality schools (Grade 3 students learn grade 1 curriculum) and competitive school markets (private schools run by educated women in a village account for a third of total pupils enrolled).

The dataset is used by Bruhn and McKenzie (2010) in their simulation of which randomization methods perform the best.

Old World Trade Routes Project

2011-02-13T05:17:00.000-08:00

T. Matthew Ciolek compiles a set of spatial data on historical trade routes in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Downloadable at
http://www.ciolek.com/owtrad.html

Nunn and Wantchekon (2010) use the Saharan trade route data to calculate the distance to trade opportunities as a control variable.

Primary school enrollment in the 19th century and the early 20th century

2011-02-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

Aaron Benavot and Phyllis Riddle (1988) compiled cross-country data on the primary school enrollment ratio in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

Used by Algan and Cahuc (2010) to check the robustness of their finding that trust boosts economic growth.

Religion Adherence Data

2011-02-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary compile a cross-country data on the share of religious people.

The data is downloadable from Robert Barro's website.

Used by Algan and Cahuc (2010) to check the robustness of their finding that trust boosts economic growth.

Cross-country poverty measures

2011-02-08T08:55:00.000-08:00

PovcalNet by the World Bank allows you to obtain a cross-country data of poverty.

See Chen and Ravallion (2010) for the methodology behind the data.

LSMS Tanzania

2011-01-23T09:39:00.003-08:00

Individual households are geo-referenced.

LSMS Albania

2011-01-23T09:39:00.001-08:00

Individual households are geo-referenced.

World Bank's Rural Investment Climate Surveys

2011-01-23T09:37:00.000-08:00

Conducted in Sri Lanka and Indonesia (Jan/Feb of 2006). Individual households/enterprises are geo-referenced.

Coastline

2011-01-18T05:51:00.000-08:00

Natural Earth provides the global coastline polyline shape file here. It is useful to calculate the distance to the nearest coastline (with the Near tool in ArcGIS), which can be used as a control variable in a cross-sectional regression.

River network

2011-01-13T05:12:00.000-08:00

Natural Earth provides the global river network polyline shape file as "Rivers + lake centerline".

This data is supposed to supersede the DNNET (River Drainage Network Data), part of the Digital Chart of the World, which was used by Duflo and Pande (2007) to locate rivers in India and to calculate the average river gradient in each district of India to predict the number of dams constructed. Penn State University's Library, which used to host the Digital Chart of the World, now directs data users to Natural Earth.

CIA World DataBank II offers the spatial data on navigable rivers. See this post on CIA World DataBank II.

Philip M. Parker's Economic Growth Databases

2011-01-10T05:33:00.000-08:00

http://faculty.insead.edu/parker/resume/personal.htm

This is a great source of control variables for any cross-country empirical analysis.

Temperature and humidity data included in "Country Statistics" is used by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) for a robustness check.

Land area, the length of the coastline, and the percentage of a country's population that is Islamic (as well as temperature and humidity) included in "Country Statistics" is used by Nunn (2008) to create control variables.

HIV Prevalence Rates

2011-01-03T08:23:00.000-08:00

Cross-country data
The UNAIDS/WHO Report on the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic annually provides data on national adult HIV prevalence rates (the percentage of the adult population living with HIV) for odd-numbered years between 1997 and 2005.

Used by Iqbal and Zorn (2010).

Sub-national data
Several DHS surveys conducted after 2000 offer HIV prevalence rates at the sub-national level.

To learn which country has such data, visit the DHS publication search webpage and select "HIV Fact Sheet" in the "Publication Type" field. Many African countries plus Ukraine, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, and Haiti are available as of April 2009.

These HIV Fact Sheets, however, do not provide all the available data. You need to browse the DHS Final Report for each survey, which can be done by visiting this webpage in the DHS website and clicking the country of your interest. Once you download the Final Report, look for the chapter on HIV prevalence, which includes a table of HIV prevalence rates by sub-national regions and by sex.

U.S. Census HIV/AIDS Surveillance Database also provides the sub-national HIV prevalence rates for selected countries, but for pregnant women only. This data is used by Oster (2007).

Barro-Lee dataset

2010-12-31T06:45:00.000-08:00

A well-known dataset on average years of schooling (i.e. stock of human capital).

The 2010 updated version is now available at www.barrolee.com.

For details on the data construction, read Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee, "International Data on Educational Attainment: Updates and Implications" (CID Working Paper No. 42, April 2000). This 2000 paper is an updated version of Barro and Lee (1993). Both papers compare various measures of human capital.

The average years of schooling is available for the six sets of the population: male over 25, female over 25, all over 25, male over 15, female over 15, all over 15.

Population over the age of 15 "corresponds better to the labor force for many developing countries." (Barro and Lee 2000, p.2)

Percentages of those who attained/completed each level of school in the total/male/female population are also available. Note that the sum of variables LU, LP, LS, and LH is 100; Lx-LxC, where x is either P, S, or H, is the percentage of those dropping out before completing primary, secondary, or higher school, respectively. In other words, the percentage of ".... school attained" contains the percentage of "... school complete".

Downloadable at this page by Center for International Development at Harvard University (CID).

The data file in the panel dataset format is best avoided because it excludes countries not in Penn World Table 5.0 (e.g. former socialist countries).

Note that variable SHCODE (numerical country code in Penn World Table 5.0) is different from the one in Penn World Table 5.6.

A very minor point, but the data entries for USSR/Russia in 1990 seem unreliable. Population seems to refer to USSR while educational attainment figures seem to refer to Russia.

Papers using this dataset include Acemoglu et al. (2005) and Glaeser et al. (2007).

For other datasets on average schooling years, see Kyriacou (1991), which is used by Benhabib and Spiegel (1994, JME), and Nehru et al. (1995), which is used by Pritchett (2000).

See Krueger and Lindahl (2001, JEL) for critical reviews on average schooling year data.

NCAER surveys of rural households in India

2010-12-15T11:58:00.000-08:00

NCAER has conducted a panel survey of rural households in India.

The first three waves (1969, 1970, 1971) were called Additional Rural Incomes Survey (ARIS). Rose (1999) use these surveys to see if excess female mortality goes up when rain fails.

The fourth and fifth waves (1981, 1999) were called Rural Economic and Demography Survey (REDS).

For details, see Andrew Foster's note.

Datasets are downloadable at this directory.

Data from the first four waves is used by Foster and Rosenzweig (1995) to estimate the impact of own and neighbor's experience on the adoption of high-yielding seeds varieties (HYVs) during the Green Revolution and the profit from it. (The Indian Green Revolution began just before the first wave of the survey was conduced.)

China Agricultural Census

2010-12-15T05:52:00.000-08:00

Qian (2008) use the 1997 round of the China Agricultural Census to obtain the county-level sown area for various crops including tea and orchard.

China Population Census

2010-12-15T05:49:00.000-08:00

China Census Databases of China Data Online by the China Data Center at University of Michigan provide access to Population Census data (subscription required).

The 1982 census is available at IPUMS-International (also see this entry).

The 1990 census is explained at China Data Online, and used by Nancy Qian's papers "Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China" and "Quantity-Quality: The Positive Effect of Family Size on School Enrollment in China".

The 2000 census is also used by Qian (2008) for obtaining the county-level data on years of schooling by cohort by sex and for using the data on whether an individual is currently living in his/her county of birth.

China Health and Nutritional Survey (CHNS)

2010-12-15T05:41:00.000-08:00

According to Qian (2008) (see page 1278), the 1981 round of the China Health and Nutritional Survey (CHNS) reports local enforcement of the one child policy.

Gross Output

2010-12-02T08:03:00.000-08:00

See Caselli, Koren, Lisicky, and Tenreyro's working paper entitled "Diversification through Trade".

Trade Openness

2010-12-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

The index of openness of trade policy (average tariff rates; non-tariff barriers; black market exchange rates; the presence of export marketing boards) was originally constructed by Sachs and Warner (1995) for the 1960s to 1980s (available here at Jonathan Temple's Economic Growth Resources website), which has been corrected and extended to the 1990s by Wacziarg and Welch (2003).

Hall and Jones (1999) is among many papers that use the Sachs-Warner index. Wacziarg and Welch's extended version is used by Giavazzi and Tabellini (2005) in their investigation of interactions between economic and political liberalizations.

There's been a debate on how to properly measure trade openness. See Pritchett (1996). Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000) criticize the Sachs-Warner index. Frankel and Romer (1999) create an instrument for the share of exports and imports to GDP, a standard measure of trade openness, based on geographical determinants of trade. This instrument is used by Dollar and Kraay (2002), for example.

Historical tariff rates since the 19th century until the pre-WWII are made available by Blattman, Clements, and Willamson (2003).

DHS Maternal Mortality Module

2010-11-07T04:19:00.000-08:00

As part of the DHS survey, surveyed women (age 15-49) are asked about the mortality of their brothers and sisters. It is originally designed to obtain maternal mortality estimates (hence the name of the module). But it can also be used to obtain adult mortality in general.

See pages 112-113 of Stanton et al. (2000) for a brief history of maternal mortality modules in the DHS surveys.

Note that not every DHS survey includes this module. To see which DHS survey contains this module, use the Survey Search page by checking the box for Maternal Mortality in "Select Survey Characteristics" (at the bottom of the page).

The model questionnaire for the maternal mortality module is available here. For the actual questionnaire used in each survey, see the end of the DHS Final Report for the survey of concern.

There is a statistics literature on whether this module can provide unbiased estimates of adult mortality. See the following papers:

Trussell, James and German Rodriguez, "A Note on the Sisterhood Estimator of Maternal
Mortality," Studies in Family Planning, 1990, 21 (6), 344-346.

Hill, K. and J. Trussell (1991) “Further developments in indirect mortality estimation”. Population Studies, 45, 455-472.

Gakidou, E., M. Hogan, A.D. Lopez (2004) “Adult mortality: Time for a reappraisal”. International Journal of Epidemiology, 33, 710-717.

Gakidou, Emmanuela and Gary King, "Death by Survey: Estimating Adult Mortality without Selection Bias from Sibling Survival Data," Demography, 2006, 43 (3), 569-585.

Economics papers using this dataset include Emily Oster (2008) "Routes of Infection: Exports and HIV Incidence in Sub-Saharan Africa." (See also her accompanying paper.)

ICRISAT Village Level Studies (VLS) Panel Data

2010-10-26T04:34:00.000-07:00

Village Level Studies by ICRISAT is "one of the first major panel surveys using a household framework in a developing country" (Strauss and Duncan (1995), page 1892).

ICRISAT provides the list of journal articles using the dataset. Examples include Behrman and Deolalikar (1987, JPE).

Townsend (1994, Econometrica) uses household data from three villages in India (Aurepalle, Kanzara, and Shirapur: see this map on the ICRISAT website for their locations) for the 10 year period between 1975 and 1984.

Fafchamps (1993, Econometrica) and Udry (1996, JPE) use household data from six villages (Woure, Silgey, Kolbila, Ouonon, Koho, and Sayero) in Burkina Faso for the three year period of 1981 to 1983.

China Historical GIS

2010-10-26T02:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/

HT: Nancy Qian.

China macroeconomic data during the pre-reform period by sector

2010-10-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

See Chow 1993.

Cross-country school quality data

2010-09-09T08:22:00.000-07:00

Alex Bartik at Yale has compiled a cross-country data on school quality.

Used by Rosenzweig (2010) to find that school quality is a significant determinant of earnings net of school years, suggesting the rejection of the Mincer model.

Rate of return to education across countries

2010-09-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2002) is the standard source of data on the rate of return to education across countries.

Banerjee and Duflo (2005) update this data in their investigation of whether the return to schooling is higher in poorer countries.

Spatial population distribution datasets

2010-08-27T03:46:00.000-07:00

LandScan

Gridded World of the Population

UNEP Africa Population Database

The following public health paper evaluates these different population map datasets:
Hay SI, Noor AM, Nelson A, Tatem AJ: The accuracy of human population maps for public health application. Trop Med IntHealth 2005, 10:1-14.

Cross-country IQ data

2010-07-28T04:05:00.000-07:00

R. Lynn and T. Vanhanen (2006) IQ and global inequality (Augusta, GA: Washington Summit) compile a cross-country data on IQ.

See section 2 of Eppig et al. (2010) for the list of papers validating this data.

Used by Eppig et al. (2010) (see also an article from The Economist magazine) to show its correlation with the disability-adjusted life years lost due to 28 infectious diseases.

World Development Indicators (WDI)

2010-07-26T00:58:00.000-07:00

The data is downloadable at http://go.worldbank.org/6HAYAHG8H0 if you or your institution has subscribed.

If you use Stata, you need to transform the WDI data structure into the country-year panel format. P. Wilner Jeanty's ado file WDIRESHAPE may be useful for this purpose.

The List of variables.

The World Bank's region classification puts Djibouti into Middle East & North Africa rather than sub-Saharan Africa. More details on the World Bank's country classification is found here.

For the treatment of countries that broke up, merged, etc., see under the heading of "Country Notes" in the Users Guide.

Data series on tax revenue goes back only to 1990 in the 2005 edition while the data for 1970-1989 was also available in the 2004 edition. This is either because the data before 1990 "have been determined to be questionable" or because "revisions to time-series cause breaks in series which cannot be reconciled by linking or other estimation techniques." See WDI's FAQ.

Data series on general government final consumption expenditure as % of GDP in the 2005 edition seems to be calculated in the current term, not in the constant term. Therefore, change in this series may result from different inflation rates between government consumption goods and the others.

Latinobarometro

2010-07-03T00:56:00.000-07:00

Since 1995, Latinobarómetro Corporation has annually conducted an opinion survey in Latin America. The data until 2005 is freely available at www.latinobarometro.org (click Data Bank). Click Publication on this website for the list of academic papers using Latinobarómetro.

Chinese provincial panel data

2010-06-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

China: government expenditure, growth, poverty, and infrastructure, 1952-2001, is compiled by IFPRI researchers. Available for free of charge.

The Comprehensive Statistical Data and Materials on 50 Years of New China, published by the China Statistical Press in 1999, provides a provincial panel data for the years 1949-1998. The CD-ROM version was published in 2004. The data on grain production is used by Meng, Qian, and Yared's working paper entitled "The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959-61".

The CHINA STATISTICAL DATABASES available at China Data Online of the China Data Center at University of Michigan provide various annual statistics at the provincial level since 1949 and monthly macroeconomic statistics since 1998. Subscription required. For what data is available and how much subscription costs, see this page.

Difang caizheng tongji ziliao (Local Public Finance Data) provides extra-budgetary revenue at the provincial level. According to Zhan (2009), this statistics is an indicator of excessive taxation and bribe extortion by local governments.

Jin, Qian, and Weingast (2005) compiled the provincial panel data (1970-1999) on the provincial government budgetary revenue, budgetary expenditure, extra-budgetary revenue, and extra-budgetary expenditure from various sources including China Statistical Yearbooks.

In his study on the impact of the Household-Responsibility System (HRS) on crop production, Lin (1992) compiled the provincial panel data from 1970 through 1987 on the gross value of crops produced, cultivated land, farm labor force, number of tractors, number of draft animals, gross weight of fertilizer consumed, the ratio of teams converted to the HRS, and so forth from various sources including National Agricultural Statistics for the 30 Years Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China, 1949-1979 (Beijing: State Statistical Bureau, 1980) and China Agricultural Yearbooks.