sustainableworld.com
Data Sources
Communications Data

The Universal Postal Union (UPU), the International Telecommunications Union(ITU), World Bank and the World Resources Institute (WRI) provide data on telecommunications. The UPU data is free, while ITU provides a large database by subscription with only limited free data, WRI provides a searchable online database while the World Bank provides very limited free data on a country by country basis.

Universal Postal Union (UPU) -- the UPU has a large database of postal statistics which is available online. The data base is somewhat more complicated to use than some of the others. You start by selecting country, category, and dates and then running a query. If you want to download the material, once the query has run, click "Personalize" at the end of the query. This will create a report in text format. I found the easiest way to convert it to a database was to copy it to a text processor (like Wordpad) and to import it from there into Excel.  The data base is available at http://www.upu.int/pls/ap/ssp_report.main?p_language=AN&p_choice=BROWSE

International Telecommunications Union (ITU) --  Limited free data is available, including some time series data at the country level, but it is available mainly in .pdf format which means that it would have to be copied by hand to a data base. This data is available at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/

World Bank -- The World Bank provides communications data in time series on its subscription data base  World Development Indicators data base.

United Nations -- Data on the communications indicators related to the Millennium Development Goals is available at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/mi/mi_goals.asp .

Copyright ©1998/2010 GRI Updated 20 May 2010