Publication: World Development Indicators 2011
Abstract
World development indicators 2011, the 15th edition in its current format, aims to provide relevant, high-quality, internationally comparable statistics about development and the quality of people's lives around the globe. Fifteen years ago, World development indicators was overhauled and redesigned, organizing the data to present an integrated view of development, with the goal of putting these data in the hands of policymakers, development specialists, students, and the public in a way that makes the data easy to use. Although there have been small changes, the format has stood the test of time, and this edition employs the same sections as the first one: world view, people, environment, economy, states and markets, and global links. This edition focuses on the impact of the decision to make data freely available under an open license and with better online tools. To help those who wish to use and reuse the data in these new ways, the section introductions discuss key issues in measuring the economic and social phenomena described in the tables and charts and introduce new sources of data. The choice of indicators and text content was shaped through close consultation with and substantial contributions from staff in the World Bank's four thematic networks sustainable development, human development, poverty reduction and economic management, and financial and private sector development and staff of the International Finance Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2011. World Development Indicators 2011. World Development Indicators. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2315 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication World Development Indicators 2010(World Bank, 2010-04-01)The 1998 edition of world development indicators initiated a series of annual reports on progress toward the International development goals. In the foreword then, World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn recognized that 'by reporting regularly and systematically on progress toward the targets the international community has set for itself, the author will focus attention on the task ahead and make those responsible for advancing the development agenda accountable for results.' The same vision inspired world leaders to commit themselves to the millennium development goals. On this, the 10th anniversary of the millennium declaration, world development indicators 2010 focuses on progress toward the millennium development goals and the challenges of meeting them.Publication World Development Indicators 2009(World Bank, 2009-04-01)World Development Indicators (WDI) 2009 arrives at a moment of great uncertainty for the global economy. The crisis that began more than a year ago in the U.S. housing market spread to the global financial system and is now taking its toll on real output and incomes. As a consequence, an additional 50 million people will be left in extreme poverty. And if the crisis deepens and widens or is prolonged, other development indicators, school enrollments, women's employment, child mortality, will be affected, jeopardizing progress toward the millennium development goals. Statistics help us understand the events that triggered the crisis and measure its impact. Along with this year's 91 data tables, each section of the WDI 2009 has an introduction that shows statistics in action, describing the history of the current crisis, its effect on developing economies, and the challenges they face. Official statistical agencies need to take a long range view of their public role, to think broadly about data needs and build strategic partnerships with academia and the private sector.Publication World Development Indicators 2006(2006)The developing world has made remarkable progress. The number of people living in extreme poverty on less than $1 a day has fallen by about 400 million in the last 25 years. Many more children, particularly girls, are completing primary school. Illiteracy rates have fallen by half in 30 years. And life expectancy is nearly 15 years longer, on average, than it was 40 years ago. The demand for statistics to measure progress and demonstrate the effectiveness of development programs has stimulated growing interest in the production and dissemination of statistics. And not just in the traditional domains of debt, demographics, and national accounts, but in new areas such as biodiversity, information, communications, technology, and measures of government and business performance. In response World Development Indicators (WDI) has continued to grow and change. In 1999 members of the statistical community, recognizing that the production of sound statistics for measuring progress is a global responsibility, established the Partnership in Statistics for Development in the twenty-first century (PARIS21) to strengthen statistical capacity at all levels. In 2000 the United Nations millennium summit called on all countries to work toward a quantified, time-bound set of development targets, which became the millennium development goals (MDG). In the five years since the millennium summit, the idea of working toward specific goals has evolved into a general strategy of managing for development results. Countries are reporting on progress toward the MDG and monitoring their own results using a variety of economic and social indicators. Bilateral and multilateral development agencies are incorporating results into their own management planning and evaluation systems and using new indicators to set targets for harmonizing their joint work programs. All of these efforts depend on statistics.Publication World Development Indicators 2008(Washington, DC, 2008)Release of the final report of the International Comparison Program (ICP) and publication of new estimates of purchasing power parities (PPPs) in World Development Indicators 2008 are an important statistical milestone. The estimates offer a consistent and comprehensive set of data on the cost of living in developed and developing countries, the first since 1997, when the results of the previous ICP data collection were published in World Development Indicators. The 2005 data cover 146 countries and territories, 29 more than the last round in 1993, and many for the first time. Collecting data on thousands of products sold through a multitude of outlets, the 2005 ICP is the largest international statistical program ever undertaken. New methods were used to describe the products being priced, record the data, and analyze the results. Countries in Africa took the opportunity to review their national accounts and adopt new standards and methods. In all regions regional coordinators worked closely with national statistical offices to collect and validate the data. The result is a genuine global effort, with an extensive capacity building component. More work will follow from the ICP. First is the revision of the international ($1 a day) poverty line and estimation of the corresponding poverty rates, certain to change a view of the absolute level of poverty in the world. PPPs have many applications in economic analysis. They are used to determine the relative size of countries and their obligations to international institutions. The publication of new estimates will inspire a new wave of academic studies. And as all of this work goes on, planning for the next round of the ICP will be getting under way.Publication World Development Indicators 2007(Washington, DC, 2007)This year the preliminary results of the international comparison program are being released, providing new comparisons of price levels for more than 140 countries. The program, the largest single data collection effort ever undertaken, is a salutary example of what can be accomplished through global partnership, technical innovation, and systematic attention to building local statistical capacity. Along with censuses, surveys are a major source of development statistics. In 2005 the international household survey network was formed to coordinate activities and provide tools for documenting and archiving surveys, thus ensuring that investments in surveys will continue to pay dividends into the future. All of these are important steps in building national and international statistical systems that respond to the demand for evidence to guide development. But more remains to be done, and the need is urgent. The challenges to us, national and international statisticians, donors, data users, and everyone concerned with measuring results, are threefold: a) how to accelerate investment in statistics; b) how to produce statistics that meet the needs of users; and c) how to harmonize donor efforts in support of developing countries as they build their statistical systems.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06)The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.Publication Design Thinking for Social Innovation(2010-07)Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.Publication Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.Publication Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008(2009-06-01)This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.Publication Measuring Financial Inclusion : The Global Findex Database(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04)This paper provides the first analysis of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) Database, a new set of indicators that measure how adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The data show that 50 percent of adults worldwide have an account at a formal financial institution, though account penetration varies widely across regions, income groups and individual characteristics. In addition, 22 percent of adults report having saved at a formal financial institution in the past 12 months, and 9 percent report having taken out a new loan from a bank, credit union or microfinance institution in the past year. Although half of adults around the world remain unbanked, at least 35 percent of them report barriers to account use that might be addressed by public policy. Among the most commonly reported barriers are high cost, physical distance, and lack of proper documentation, though there are significant differences across regions and individual characteristics.