Global Poverty Data Should Be Public : A Data Set and Three Requests

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    The World Bank’s Poverty Statistics Lack Median Income Data, So We Filled In the Gap Ourselves — Download Available | Center For Global Development
    ▻http://www.cgdev.org/blog/world-bank-poverty-statistics-lack-median-income-data-so-we-filled-gap-oursel

    http://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/median-income-data.png

    PovcalNet, the World Bank’s global poverty database, provides all kinds of country statistics, including mean income, the share (and number) of the population living in absolute poverty ($1.90), the poverty gap and several measures of income inequality, such as the Gini coefficient. But one thing it doesn’t provide is median income or consumption. The median is a better measure of “typical” well-being than the mean, which is always skewed to the right.

    We’ve been waiting for the World Bank to add these medians to its PovcalNet database, but we got impatient and did it ourselves. By manually running a few hundred queries in PovcalNet, we now have (and can share with you) the latest median income/consumption data for 144 countries (using 2011 PPPs — more on our methods below).

    Download: country-median-data-2011-PPP-Diofasi-Birdsall.xls

    #revenu_médian #scraping #banque_mondiale #statistiques #data

    Fil
    • @simplicissimus
      Simplicissimus

      Basé sur…

      Global Poverty Data Should Be Public: A Data Set and Three Requests | Center For Global Development
      ▻http://www.cgdev.org/blog/global-poverty-data-should-be-public-data-set-and-three-requests

      We just ran 23 million queries of the World Bank’s website. Technically, a piece of computer code did the work, occupying a PC in an empty cubicle in our office for about 9 weeks, gradually sweeping up nearly every bit of information available in the World Bank’s global database on poverty and inequality, known as PovcalNet.

      Why did we go through all this trouble? The parochial answer is that we wanted to use the data for our own research and got frustrated with the World Bank website designed to dole out the data in bite-size chunks, rather than the large swaths researchers might want. After a somewhat, erm, delicate negotiation with colleagues at the World Bank, we’ve just posted the resulting paper, data set, and code online, so data-oriented readers can now download the full income and consumption distributions from 952 surveys across 127 countries over 35 years in a convenient set of CSV files, rather than running repetitive queries of the PovcalNet web interface.

      The more grandiose motivation for our 23 million web queries is that a serious public debate about global poverty and inequality goals is potentially unfolding, and serious public debate requires transparent public access to the underlying data in question.

      Simplicissimus
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