Data from the Wolrd Bank

There is a wealth of data-sets pretty much about every country in the world available for free from April 2010 by the World Bank. Data ranges from agricultural use, educational / medical standards to financial development indicators. I discovered this resource while looking for some macroeconomic data for one of my PhD experiments. Weirdly enough I ended up browsing the huge data-set for hours and had a great time discovering the various differences in education, health and economic production between countries. For example I found that people are very keen about education in Kazachstan, in certain years even more so than in France - play around by selecting different countries.

Arable land (% of land area)

Data from World Bank, Martin's Blog :-)

You can even compose cool widgets like the one above!

I personally most enjoy browsing the data by the actual available indicators and getting to know what they mean. I found this to be a great resource and hence had to share it with my readers and btw. there's also an API for any developers out there, looks pretty neat.

Other Institutions have also opened up much of their data-records:

• US Bureau of Labout Statistics
• US Bureau of Economic Analysis (the famous BEA)
• US Data.gov
• EU Eurostat
• OECD
• UK National Statistics

My favourite book on many of these indicators is the book by Richard Yamarone - I read parts of it and it is an enlightening read, Richard provides a complete view of each discussed indicator, it's history, it's derivations, computation and uses. Highly recommended!