LibGuides: UGS 303: Global Development / Gerring: Statistics

Numbers are very seductive

"Statistics borrow from mathematics an air of precision and certainty but also call on human judgment and so are subject to bias and imprecision." From Making Sense of Statistics

Don't think of numbers as dry facts. They need to be evaluated for credibility just like anything else.

Who collected this data and for what purpose?
Did someone pay to have this data collected?
What factors might have impacted the data and its interpretation thereof?

Polling the Nations
Includes 80 countries. Not all surveys are up to date for every country.

Updated monthly. A comprehensive compilation of public opinion surveys, containing the full text of more than 350,000 questions and responses from 14,000 surveys conducted by 700 polling organizations in the United States and more than 80 other countries.
MarketLine Advantage
$$$$ research. Pretty indepth. This is very exclusive content that most people don't have access to. Use the Country Profiles search.

Updated regularly. Provides business news, opinion, and latest published reports help users to understand key trends and events, while qualitative and quantitative data and analysis support business research programs.
Access to this resource is partially funded by the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.
World Development Indicators (WDI)
Use the World Development Indicators database or International Debt Statistics to start (plenty more to investigate!). Make sure your pop ups are enabled.
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Updated quarterly. An extensive collection of data about global development. Provides more than 550 times series covering demographic, social, economic, financial, natural resources and environmental topics for more than 200 countries and 18 country groups. You can access the data through the dataBank, as an ebook, or in Excel or CSV formats.
World Bank Terms of Use