For over three decades debt statistics published by the World Bank have provided the authoritative accounting of the external debt of developing countries. Governments, investors and bankers, academics, and journalists have relied on them to identify financial trends and vulnerabilities.
It’s raining data. Financial inclusion data, that is. The Development Research Group has published the complete micro dataset of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) dataset on the Open Data Microdata Library. We’re talking over 150,000 individual-level observations, representing adults in 148 economies and 97 percent of the world’s adult population. Users can download the complete worldwide dataset, or datasets by country.
Update: the event will be webstreamed on World Bank Live.
This is an exciting time to be in the data business. There have never been more groups, from such different backgrounds, with a passion for producing and using data for the public good.
Let’s say you are in the middle of what others may call ‘nowhere’ and need information on the Bank’s work in the vicinity before an upcoming meeting with local officials. Or you are a civil society organization rep and want to make sure that the numbers you have about a particular project are the same as what the Bank reports (and if not, you want to know why not).
Your laptop is no good because - it is the middle of nowhere after all! - and you can only rue your decision to leave your stack of papers behind.
What do you do? Well, the answer might be in your pocket.
It took longer than we'd hoped but it's finally here - the new World Bank Finances app answers many of the questions you asked after the release of the first version last year (click here to download the new version for Android; an updated iOS version will be out soon).
