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Data Sources

 United Nations -- Unrestricted Access Databases

The UN provides unrestricted access to a variety of databases with population and other social and economic indicators.  The databases include the Census Knowledge Base; the Demographic Yearbook System; Dystat, The United Nations Disability Database; the Good Practices Database; InfoNation; the Joint Oil Initiative; the Millennium Indicators Database, the Monthly Bulletin of Statistics Online; National Accounts Main Aggregates Database; Population of capital cities and cities of 100,000 and more inhabitants; Population and housing censuses: census dates; Population and Vital Statistics on Internet; Service Trade Statistics; Social Indicators; and, Statistics and indicators on women and men. These can be accessed at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/databases.htm . The links on the page do not necessarily lead to a single data base, but often to a page with a number of databases available.

The Millennium Development Goals

The Millennium Development Indicators have been developed to track the Millennium Development Goals  (MDG) adopted by the United Nations and the World Bank as targets for the development activities of member countries between 1990 and 2015.  There are eight goals which have associated with them 18 targets. Each of these targets has one or more economic/social indicators associated with it.  The indicators may involve more than one time series.  The time series run from 1989 which was the year before the base year for measuring the goals, but for many of the indicators the data does not go that far back. In some cases, there is no data at all for an indicator, some indicators will have only data for one year, while others have a full time series.  The data is free and may be downloaded indicator by indicator into Excel format.

For the latest progress report on the Millennium Development  Goals go to http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/default.aspx .  Country data for each of the indicators is available at http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Data.aspx. Clicking on the "+" to the left of each of the goals listed on the page will list the targets for the particular goal. The individual indicators can be accessed by clicking on the "+" beside the targets.

Copyright ©2004/2010 GRI      Updated 13 May 2010