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Chart: High-Tech Exports Gaining Ground in Kazakhstan

Erin Scronce's picture

Over the past two decades, high-tech exports from Kazakhstan have been increasing steadily. The World Bank Group has been working since 2008 with the Kazakh Government and scientist groups to further expand the country’s high-tech exports in a number of sectors. Through the Technology Commercialization Project, 65 new startups received grant funding and business training to get their innovations out of the lab and into markets. The startups operate in a wide variety of industries including agriculture, health, medicine, gas, oil and robotics. Already 40 of these businesses have reached first sales.

Find out more about the project and how it energized innovation in Kazakhstan
 

Q4 2016 Update of World Development Indicators Available

World Bank Data Team's picture

The World Development Indicators database has been updated. This is a regular quarterly update to over 800 indicators and includes both new indicators and updates to existing indicators. 

This release features new external debt data from the International Debt Statistics database, and revised data for national accounts, PPP series, balance of payments, FDI inflows, remittances, and monetary indicators. Updates have also been made for government finance indicators, malnutrition series, education aggregates, Enterprise Surveys, commercial banks, refugees, high-technology exports, and other trade-related indicators. IDA and IBRD group data have been adjusted to reflect Syrian Arab Republic's reclassification as an IDA only country.

Data can be accessed via various means including:

- The World Bank’s main multi-lingual and mobile-friendly data website, http://data.worldbank.org 
- The DataBank query tool: http://databank.worldbank.org which also includes archived, previous versions of WDI
- Bulk download in XLS and CSV formats and directly from the API
 

The 2017 edition of International Debt Statistics is out

World Bank Data Team's picture

The 2017 edition of International Debt Statistics has just been published.

IDS 2017 presents statistics and analysis on the external debt and financial flows (debt and equity) for the world’s economies for 2015. This publication provides more than 200 time series indicators from 1970 to 2015 for most reporting countries. To access the report and related products you can:

This year’s edition of International Debt Statistics been reconfigured to offer a more con­densed presentation of the principal indicators, along with additional tables showcasing quar­terly external debt statistics and public sector debt to respond to user demand for timely, comprehensive data on trends in external debt in low middle and high income coun­tries.

By providing comprehensive and timely data that reflects the latest additions and revisions, and by expanding the scope of the data available online, we aim to serve the needs of our users and to reach a wider audience.

Latest from the LSMS: DNA fingerprinting, population mapping, energy access, and surveying forests and livestock

Raka Banerjee's picture


The LSMS team continues to support the World Bank's pledge to collaborate with the 78 poorest countries to collect high-quality national household survey data every three years, to better inform investments and policies to eradicate extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity. A big part of this effort involves improving data collection methods in key areas. Toward that end, under the aegis of the World Bank’s Household Survey Working Group, we have developed a methodological research plan that focuses on welfare, gender, agriculture, and data processing/dissemination. Work is underway, and LSMS is collaborating with UNESCO, ILO, FAO, and other international organizations to establish standards and validate methods for data collection. As part of this effort, at a recent expert consultation at our Center for Development Data in Rome (hosted with FAO), representatives from development agencies and national statistical offices agreed on draft guidelines for collecting data on food consumption. Currently, there are no internationally agreed-upon standards for household consumption and expenditure surveys, so bringing this agenda forward can greatly improve the quality and comparability of global poverty, food security, and nutrition data.

New Data from Niger and Uganda!

Niger: The data from wave 2 of the Niger Enquête Nationale sur les Conditions de Vie des Ménages et l'Agriculture (ECVMA 2014) are now available. This panel dataset follows from the 2011 survey; 3,614 of the original 3,859 households were re-interviewed. The ECVMA is implemented in collaboration with the Niger Institut National de la Statistique (INS).

Uganda: The Uganda National Panel Survey (UNPS) 2013/14 data are also available.  This round follows from the 2005/06, 2009/10, 2010/11, and 2011/12 rounds and includes 3,119 households. The UNPS is implemented in collaboration with the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.
 

DNA Fingerprinting, Drones and Remote Sensing in Ethiopia

CGIAR-Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA) implemented two data experiments in collaboration with LSMS, the World Bank, and the Ethiopian Central Statistical Agency. One experiment examined data accuracy on measuring improved sweet potato varietal adoption. It compared three household-based methods against DNA fingerprinting benchmark. These included: (i) farmer elicitation, (ii) farmer elicitation using visual-aid, and (iii) enumerator elicitation using visual-aid. Visual-aid protocols were better than farmer elicitation, but still far below the benchmark estimates. Another experiment focused on crop residue coverage measurement. It compared four survey-based (interviewee and enumerator estimations as well as use of visual-aid protocol) and two aerial (drones' images and remote sensing) methods against a line-transect benchmark. The results ranked measurement options for survey practitioners and researchers in conservation agriculture.

Chart: What Share of Health Costs are Paid Out of Pocket?

Tariq Khokhar's picture
Also available in: 中文

In many low and middle income countries, out-of-pocket healthcare expenditures are high, and can be a significant financial risk to the poor. Universal health coverage (UHC) is about people having access to needed health care without suffering undue financial hardship.

Measuring livestock for livelihoods

Vini Vaid's picture
Download Publication (PDF)

Many rural households in low- and middle-income countries depend on livestock for their livelihoods. Sustainable livestock systems can contribute to reducing poverty, ending hunger, and improving health, and can also be key in addressing environmental degradation and climate change, and preserving biodiversity.

Measuring livestock systems—and the socioeconomic benefits they generate—remains a challenge due to a lack of high-quality, nationally representative data. Livestock is often neglected in many national statistical operations and, as a result, decision makers are unable to design evidence-based livestock sector policies and investments.

A new multi-partner publication provides guidance for effectively including livestock in multi-topic and agricultural household surveys. The livestock module template provided in this Guidebook can be used by survey practitioners and stakeholders to generate household-level statistics on livestock, its role in the household economy, and its contribution to livelihoods. It builds on a variety of multi-topic and agricultural/livestock household survey questionnaires implemented in low- and middle-income countries, and on lessons learned from the implementation of comprehensive livestock questionnaires, as part of multi-topic household surveys, in Niger, Tanzania, and Uganda.

The Guidebook is the result of collaboration between the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) team, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics, and the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.

For practical advice on household survey design, visit the LSMS Guidebooks page: http://go.worldbank.org/0ZOAP159L0

 

Doing Business Trading Across Borders and Logistics Performance Index: similar yet different

Valentina Saltane's picture


People who look at the Doing Business report’s Trading Across Borders indicator and the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) often wonder why one country can perform well on one of the rankings but not so well on the other although they both measure trade and logistics. In fact, earlier this year, the Doing Business team organized a workshop at the World Bank Global Knowledge and Research Hub in Kuala Lumpur to clarify the differences between the two datasets.

Let’s start off with a few definitions:

The Doing Business report is a World Bank Group flagship publication, which covers 11 areas of business regulations. Trading Across Borders is one of these areas. It looks specifically at the logistical processes of exporting and importing. Data is updated annually and the latest edition covers 190 economies. Doing Business collects data from local experts and measures performance as reported by domestic entrepreneurs, while taking into consideration factual laws and regulations.

The Logistics Performance Index is a benchmarking tool which focuses on trade logistics. It is created to help countries identify the challenges and opportunities they face as they relate to customs, border management, transport infrastructure, and logistics services. Updated biennially, the latest data and report cover 160 economies. Data is collected from global freight forwarders and express carriers who provide feedback on the logistical “friendliness” of the countries they operate.

How level is the playing field between countries in Latin America and the Caribbean?

Oscar Calvo-González's picture
Also available in: Español | Portuguese

In less than a generation the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region has made great progress in expanding the basic public services that are necessary for children to succeed later in life. The skills, knowledge and health accumulated by individuals by the time they reach adulthood are essential to get jobs, accelerate economic mobility, and reduce inequality in the long-run. The progress observed in LAC ranges from increased access to healthcare and schools to running water and electricity. But progress has also been uneven, both across countries and for different types of basic services.

Today, the playing field in Latin America is most level in access to electricity, where we have seen gaps in coverage narrow the most. Figure 1 below shows how the typical performance in the region (the median) compares with the country in the region with the highest level of coverage (labeled “best in class”) in three basic services for children. The focus on children makes it possible to determine that any difference in access would be mostly due to circumstances out of their control. In the case of access to electricity the regional median has not only converged towards the best performing country but it has now reached a coverage of 99 percent.

What global opinion leaders think about climate change in three charts

Jing Guo's picture
Also available in: Français | العربية | Español

In early November, nearly 200 countries came together at the UN climate change conference (COP22) in Marrakech to reaffirm their commitment to the historic “Paris Agreement.” If the COP21 was about signing this agreement, this year’s conference is about the critical next step of turning commitment into action.

To track overall opinions of thought leaders across the globe, including views toward climate change before and after the landmark deal, the World Bank Group’s Country Opinion Survey program annually surveys nearly 10,000 key influencers working in government, parliament, private sector, civil society, media, and academia in more than 40 development countries. The results help shed light on the overall public opinion environment where efforts to operationalize the Agreement will likely take place.

The following charts provide a snapshot view of global opinion leaders’ (in developing countries) attitudes toward climate change.

Overall, survey data suggest that concern about climate change among opinion leaders worldwide has increased significantly in the past four years. While the percentage of respondents considering addressing climate change a top development priority is relatively lower than that of education, governance, and food security in many countries, data clearly show an upward trend in the perceived importance of combatting climate change since 2015.



 

7 million prices and counting: what’s next for PPPs and the ICP?

Haishan Fu's picture
First meeting of ICP Governing Board

This month’s meeting of the International Comparison Program (ICP) Governing Board marked a new chapter in one of the world’s most far-reaching statistical operations. The release of the 2011 ICP round results in 2014 was met with some disagreement among scholars, but a dominant view emerged that they represent an improvement over the 2005 round. The release triggered a revision of the international poverty line which was updated from $1.25 / day in 2005 PPPs to $1.90 / day in 2011 PPPs. The IMF also uses the resulting PPPs in its Quota subscription allocation, as does the UNDP in the calculation of the Human Development Report’s Human Development Index (HDI), and a number of the SDGs involve PPPs in their measurement.

The ICP estimates purchasing power parities, or PPPs, for use as currency converters to compare the size and price levels of economies around the world. PPP-based measures are critical for assessing the real living conditions of individuals in different countries, and for establishing a common yardstick for measuring progress. Just as important as what it does is how it does it - the ICP is a partnership, and a great example of how working together can yield great benefits to all stakeholders.

The Global ICP Unit - part of the official statistical architecture

The World Bank is now home to the permanent Global ICP Unit, which has this year been instituted as a formal part of the global statistical program by the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC). This development puts the ICP on a stable long-term footing and is a testimony to the ICP’s collective efforts to ensure the success and continuity of the program.

Since its establishment in 1968, the ICP has grown to cover all regions of the world and become the world’s largest statistical initiative. The 2011 round of the ICP covered 199 economies from eight regions with the help of 15 regional and international partners.

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