Visualization data for world development

From Damian Clarke:

I am a PhD student in economics at the University of Oxford, and a fan of your blog.  Much of my work focuses on the microeconomics of development (principally fertility and education), however I am also working on the use of open data in economic development – quite an exciting area.  I write you with regards to this open data work.  Recently I have written a module for Stata which allows anyone to automatically import any of the over 5000 indicators maintained by the World Bank, and produces both a geographic and time series representation of the data (I provide a png attachment of this graph here if you are interested in seeing it)…

Whilst this program may be useful for researchers, I think its prinicipal benefit is in pedagogy – perhaps even users of MRUniversity would be interested in visualising for example fertility, GDP, current account balances, etc in a simple command.  The syntax really is very easy: “worldstat Africa, stat(GDP)”.

I provide at the end of this email a brief description, and more details are available on my site: https://sites.google.com/site/damiancclarke/computation#TOC-worldstat

…worldstat is a module which allows for the current state of world development to be visualised in a computationally simple way. worldstat presents both the geographic and temporal variation in a wide range of statistics which represent the state of national development. While worldstat includes a number of “in-built” statistics such as GDP, maternal mortality and years of schooling, it is extremely flexible, and can (thanks to the World Bank’s module wbopendata) easily incorporate over 5,000 other indicators housed in World Bank Open Databases.

…it is automatically available from Stata’s command line by typing: “ssc install worldstat”

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