世界宏观数据库链接总结（Markus Eberhardt）

The World Bank provides (in collaboration with the IMF) the [color=#089c9 !important]Quarterly External Debt Statistics - these come in two variants, the general (GDDS) and special (SDDS) dissemination. Currently, sixty countries have agreed to participate in the SDDS/QEDS database and forty-two Low-Income Countries (LICs) to provide data to the GDDS/QEDS database. Data begins in 1998.

The [color=#089c9 !important]Joint External Debt Hub (JEDH - pronounced Jedi?) — jointly developed by the Bank for International Settlements(BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank (WB) — brings together external debt data and selected foreign assets from international creditor/market and national debtor sources. The JEDH replaces the (above) Joint BIS-IMF-OECD-WB Statistics on External Debt and brings together 34 data series from the above institutions. Coverage starts in 1990 and can be up to quarterly, for all countries in the world, although this depends on the variable (e.g. 'International Reserves' seemed to have a very good [from 1990] and quarterly coverage but other variables start later, are less frequent and less broad in country-terms). [This dataset was featured in an article by Sarah Bracking in the Google magazine [color=#089c9 !important]thinkquarterly]

Christoph Trebesch at Munich University (LMU) provides [color=#089c9 !important]data on debt restructuring episodes from 1950-2010 from a research project with Udaibir Das and Michael Papaioannou (IMF). The data can be downloaded in Excel format and provides information on the timing (month/year) of the restructuring, amount, etc. Over 600 episodes are recorded. An accompanying IMF working paper provides details on concepts and reviews the existing literature.

The World Bank's new [color=#089c9 !important]International Debt Statistics are now available as part of the institution's Open Data Initiative: "high frequency, quarterly, external and public debt data for both high-income and developing countries collected and compiled by the World Bank in partnership with the International Monetary Fund. Now users can not only examine trends in debt flows within the developing world, but also take a closer look at the external debt of high-income countries, and develop a more complete understanding of global financial flows". Picking the standard measure of external debt burden (in % of GNI) I found data from 1970 to 2011 for around 140 countries (unbalanced). A large number of more differentiated data are available, with varying time series and cross-section coverage.

The Inter-American Development Bank provides data on [color=#089c9 !important]Bank Ownership and Bank Performance covering 119 countries over the 1995-2002 period. The methodology used to generate the data is described in Micco, Panizza and Yanez (2004) "Bank Ownesrhip and Performance," IDB-RES working paper No. 518.

The Chinn-Ito index ([color=#089c9 !important]KAOPEN) is an index measuring a country's degree of capital account openness. The index was initially introduced in [color=#089c9 !important]Chinn and Ito (Journal of Development Economics, 2006). KAOPEN is based on the binary dummy variables that codify the tabulation of restrictions on cross-border financial transactions reported in the IMF's Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions (AREAER). The dataset is available in the Excel or STATA format. The data file contains the Chinn and Ito index series for the time period of 1970-2007 for 182 countries.  [Thanks to [color=#089c9 !important]Malgorzata Sulimierska at Sussex University for the link]

Huang Yongfu at Cambridge's Land Economy department has some links to [color=#089c9 !important]datasets on Financial Developments as well as other resources on the topic (researchers in the area, papers).

The IMF has a new database reporting the [color=#089c9 !important]access to basic consumer financial services worldwide. At present this data covers 138 economies, nominally for the period 1998-2009, although most countries only have data from 2004 onwards. Annual information covers the reported use of banking services and access to banks' physical outlets. The data for all countries and time periods cam be downloaded as an Excel file. [via [color=#089c9 !important]economicslinks]

The Global Financial Inclusion ([color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Global Findex) Database is a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to measure how people in 148 countries --- including the poor, women, and rural residents --- save, borrow, make payments and manage risk. The dataset has been compiled by Leora Klapper and Asli Demirguc-Kunt of the World Bank and can be downloaded from the World Bank Open Data website (there are a total of 517 indicators for a max of 164 countries --- at the moment this is for 2011 only).

$$ The new IMF [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Financial Soundness Indicators provide information on the health of the entire sector of financial institutions, but also the counterpart corporate and household sectors, and of relevant markets. So far 64 countries have committed to participate, with the frequency of data left to the discretion of the countries. The database contains 12 core indicators, including variables like "Nonperforming loans to total gross loans" or "Return on Assets", with the data (at present) provided in excel spreadsheets. Further new databases from the IMF include the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Coordinated Direct Investment Survey(CDIS, from December 2010, dyadic data on inward and outward investment) and the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS, covers equity securities, long- and short-term debt securities broken down by economy of residence of the issuer of the securities).

$$ Another IMF database are the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]High Frequency Government Statistics, which has annual, quarterly and (for some variables and countries) monthly data on the balance sheet. This is included in the International Financial Statistics.


Social security, Taxes and the State
David Canning (Harvard) provides [color=#089c9 !important]social security data for 57 countries over the period 1961-2002 (not annual) on his personal homepage. The data is available in MS Excel 2003 format. As is explained in the documentation of the dataset, social security systems are highly complex and vary greatly across countries, so the authors (this data was used for an article by Bloom, Canning, Mansfield and Moore, Journal of Monetary Economics, 2007) explain in great detail how they constructed the four measures they provide.

The [color=#089c9 !important]World Tax Indicators (WTI) at the International Center for Public Policy, Georgia State University, offers extensive coverage of the Personal Income Tax (PIT), Corporate Income Tax (CIT), and Value Added Tax (VAT)/ Retail Sales Tax (RST) with greater year, country, and tax category coverage than is currently offered via existing data portals. The WTI uses the raw data to develop several tax indicators such as time varying measures of PIT structural progressivity and tax complexity and offers a large representative dataset with variables that are consistent within countries over time. PIT data is already available for download as Excel or Stata files (175 countries or more, depending on measure; up to 25 years of data), including substantial documentation (brief registration required).

The [color=#089c9 !important]World Tax Database is provided by the Ross School of Business, Michigan University. Variables include Tax Revenue and Tax Rates. Data is from 1974 to 1999.

The Quality of Government Institute at the University of Gothenburg publishes the [color=#089c9 !important]QoG Dataset in Stata, SPSS and csv format. "The aim of the QoG Social Policy Dataset is to promote cross-national comparative research on social policy output and its correlates, with a special focus on the connection between social policy and quality of government (QoG). To accomplish this we have compiled a number of freely available data sources, including aggregated public opinion data." There are three versions: (1) a cross-section with global coverage (2002); and two panels for 40 countries either annual (1946-2009) or 5-yearly (1970-2005). The topics covered are Social policy, Tax system, structural conditions for social policy, Public opinion, Political indicators and Quality of government.

A recent article by Simeon Djankov and co-authors in the AEJ: Macro comes with [color=#089c9 !important]cross-section data on effective corporate income tax rates in 85 countries (2004). "The data come from a survey, conducted jointly with PricewaterhouseCoopers, of all taxes imposed on "the same" standardized mid-size domestic firm." The authors provide the data in Stata format, together with a do-file.

Mariya Aleksynska and Martin Schindler at the IMF have created a new [color=#089c9 !important]database of labor market regulations covering 1980-2005 in 91 countries, including low-, middle- and high-income countries. The database contains information on unemployment insurance systems, minimum wage regulations, and employment protection legislation. [Thanks to my former PhD colleague [color=#089c9 !important]Bob Rijkers, now at the World Bank, for the link].

The Inter-American Development Bank provides the [color=#089c9 !important]Public Debt around the World database, which includes complete time-series of central government debt for 89 countries over the 1991-2005 period and for seven other countries for the 1993-2005 period. The data (both in STATA and EXCEL format) is described in Dany Jaimovich and Ugo Panizza (2006) "Public Debt around the World: A New Dataset of Central Government Debt" which is included in the zipped folder.

Infrastructure and logistics[color=#089c9 !important]A Research Database on Infrastructure Economic Performance (1980-2002), compiled by Antonio Estache and Ana Goicoechea at the World Bank. The time-series nominally begins in 1980, but for many variables data is only available from 1990 onwards.

David Canning at Harvard has been working on infrastructure datasets for the past decade(s). His most recent (2007) offering is the [color=#089c9 !important]World Infrastructure Stock Data for 1950-2005, which covers 185(!) countries and is supplied in excel files. The main variables contain information on rail and road networks, telephone lines and electricity generating capacity - of these the telephone data has broadest coverage.

[color=#089c9 !important]The World Road Statistics (1963-1989) were compiled by the International Road Federation for up to 196 countries and are available on the World Bank website.

Fulvio Castellacci and Jose Miguel Natera have created a balanced panel dataset for cross-country analyses of national systems, growth and development ([color=#089c9 !important]CANA) hosted by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. The originality of this dataset (which draws on a variety of sources) is in that the gaps in the data have been filled, using a methodology of multiple (and repeated) imputations by two political scientists, Honaker and King (2010). I have not looked at the [color=#089c9 !important]Castellaci & Natera paper describing the data construction and robustness checks in detail, but am a priori quite sceptical about imputations: these macro variables are likely to be integrated, so imputations could be rather misleading. On the other hand, missing data is a serious problem for a lot of the dimensions they consider: (1) Innovation and technological capabilities; (2) Education and human capital; (3) Infrastructures; (4) Economic competitiveness; (5) Social capital; (6) Political and institutional factors. There are a total of 41 indicators for 134 countries over the period 1980-2008. The data is in excel format and well-documented. I'd say keep an eye out for reviews and applications of this dataset.

The World Bank has a dedicated website for the [color=#089c9 !important]Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD) which combines data collection and analysis on the status of the main network infrastructures. "The AICD database provides cross-country data on network infrastructure for nine major sectors: air transport, information and communication technologies, irrigation, ports, power, railways, roads, water and sanitation." This is a relatively young data collection effort, with only a few years of data available at the time of writing. Download is via the WB's excellent open data system (view data, download as excel or CSV).

The UN body which covers trade and investment, UNCTAD, has created a snazzy website that combines all of its statistical databases: [color=#089c9 !important]UNCTADstat has lots of data on trade (merchandise, services), FDI flows and stocks (inward FDI from 1970!), external finance (incl. remittances), labour force/employment, global commodity price indices (from 1960!) as well as some more recent rubrics such as the creative and information economies and maritime transport (from around 2000).

The World Bank has a [color=#089c9 !important]Logistics Performance Index (LPI), covering 150 countries. This is cross-section data only.

Geography, GIS, Climate & Environment[color=#089c9 !important]Geography Datasets, compiled by John Gallup, Andrew Mellinger, and Jeff Sachs, available at Harvard CID. These contain cross-country data on Infectious Diseases, Physical geography and population, Köppen-Geiger Climate zones (The H zone is highland, E is for polar regions), and Agricultural Measures (including soil quality and the share of arable land in each Köppen-Geiger zone). Naturally, this data is a single cross-section.

The [color=#089c9 !important]G-Econ research project at Yale University is devoted to developing a geophysically based dataset on economic activity for the world. The current data set (GEcon 3.3) is now publicly available and covers "gross cell product" for all regions for 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005 and includes 27,500 terrestrial observations. The basic metric is the regional equivalent of gross domestic product. Gross cell product (GCP) is measured at a 1-degree longitude by 1-degree latitude resolution at a global scale. Updates will be posted as they become available. The project director is Professor William Nordhaus, Yale University. The GEcon 3.4 (Aug 2010) spreadsheet has over 27,000 entries (cells) and there are at least two time-series data points for GCP of various types (non-mineral, mineral) and more for cell population. [via Masa Kudamatsu's[color=#089c9 !important]DEVECONDATA blog]

[color=#089c9 !important]Data on Geodesic Distances are provided by the Centre D'Etudes Prospectives et D'Information Internationales (CEPII). A first dataset incorporates geographical variables for 225 countries in the world, including the geographical coordinates of their capital cities, the languages spoken in the country under different definitions, a variable indicating whether the country is landlocked, etc. A second dataset is dyadic, i.e. includes variables valid for pairs of countries (bilateral distance, among others).

The Center for International Earth Science Information Network ([color=#089c9 !important]CIESIN) at Columbia's Earth Institute provides dozens of datasets under the headlines of Agriculture, Biodiversity & Ecosystems, Climate Change, Economic Activity, Environmental Assessment & Modeling, Environmental Health, Environmental Treaties, Indicators, Land Use (LU)/ Land Cover (LC) and LU/LC Change, Natural Hazards, Population, Poverty, Remote Sensing for Human Dimensions Research. The overarching theme for all datasets is environment and climate (change). Since not all data are accessible from the website there's a separate page for[color=#089c9 !important]downloadable data.

A team headed by Cort J. Willmott at the University of California, Los Angeles has put together a [color=#089c9 !important]website with four to five decades of data on Monthly Air Temperature, Monthly Total Precipitation, Monthly Terrestrial Water Budgets and Monthly Moisture Indices. You'll need some help from a GIS person to get the data transformed.

The [color=#089c9 !important]Minimum Distance Data provided by Kristian Skrede Gleditsch at Essex University are based on the list of states outlined in Gleditsch, Kristian S. & Michael D. Ward. 1999. "A Revised List of Independent States since 1816," International Interactions 25:393-413. This list differs in certain ways from the list of system members maintained by the COW project and labels used by the COW project. This data source requires that you have a copy of Perl on your system (Kristian provides links and help). You may also be interested in data on distance between capital cities, available on the same website.

he US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) provides data on [color=#089c9 !important]nighttime light from 5 different satellites covering 1992 to 2009 (Version 4). "Each satellite observes every location on the planet (between 65 degrees S latitude and 65 degrees N latitude) every night at some time between 8:30 and 10:00pm. Using night lights during the dark half of the lunar cycle in seasons when the sun sets early removes intense sources of natural light, leaving mostly man-made light. Readings affected by auroral activity (the northern and southern lights) and forest fires are also removed both manually and using frequency filters." There are a total of 30 files, each a zipped folder of 300MB. [The above quote is taken from Henderson, Storeygard and Weil (2008) [color=#089c9 !important]Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space, who use a previous version of the data; see also next entry]

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN publishes [color=#089c9 !important]AquaStat which represents a "global information system on water and agriculture, developed by the Land and Water Division. The main mandate of the programme is to collect, analyze and disseminate information on water resources, water uses, and agricultural water management with an emphasis on countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean." A bit more specifically, the main Aquastat database reports 70 variables under the headings 'Land use and population', 'Climate and water resources', 'Water use (by sector and by source)', 'Irrigation and drainage development' and 'Environment and health' for 5-year intervals from 1958-1962 onwards for a large number of countries. Other databases include the excellent 'Geo-referenced database on dams' and data on 'River sediment yields'. The data can be exported in CSV format.

Adam Storeygard, formerly an Economics PhD at Brown but soon at Tufts (update 2012!), has a selection of GIS Global Spatial Datasets on a dedicated [color=#089c9 !important]website. Categories include administrative boundaries, population and other demographic indicators, economic indicators, data related to agriculture, infrastructure, climate and terrain. He's also put together some[color=#089c9 !important]Miscellaneous notes and resources on learning GIS for beginners, building on his own experience of working with GIS data.

The World Bank has recently published its annual World Development Report, which this year focuses on [color=#089c9 !important]Conflict, Security and Development. A dedicated [color=#089c9 !important]website makes the data underlying the analysis in the report easily accessible. The excel spreadsheet covers a total of 211 countries, with maximum coverage over the years 1960-2009. The data is not limited to conflict and political economy issues but also covers geography, colonial history and foreign aid among other topics. All of the data is publicly available (and many datasets are featured here on MEDevEcon), but the unique advantage here is bringing a vast number of conflict-related data from dozens of sources (PRIO, UNHCR, Polity IV, etc.) together in a single spreadsheet (and doing a great job documenting the data and sources.

"In a world of secrets and closed access to data, it comes as a pleasant surprise to discover that there is a huge quantity of data available to anyone, free of charge. This data has complete world coverage, and an astonishing range of data types all gathered together in one package": [color=#089c9 !important][url=http://www.mapability.com/index1.html?http&&&www.mapability.com/info/vmap0_index.html]Vector Map (VMap) Level 0[/url], provided by mapAbility.com. The VMap Level 0 database provides worldwide coverage of vector-based geospatial data which can be viewed at 1:1,000,000 scale, i.e. 1cm=10km. "Need the national coastlines, elevation contours, roads and railways for any country you can think of? They are there, of course. Populated places, administrative boundaries, inland waterways? There too. But how about the more obscure data types - Lighthouse, Fish Farm, Cease-Fire Line, Oasis, Wharf, Communication Tower? All there as well." [via [color=#089c9 !important]DEVECONDATAby Masa Kudamatsu]

As part of AQUASTAT the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN provides [color=#089c9 !important]databases for over 1,300 dams in Sub-Saharan Africa and over 1,100 dams in the Middle East/Central Asia (excel files with substantial documentation). Each dam is geo-referenced and additional information includes dam height, capacity, reservoir area, river, nearest city, among others.

A vast number of geo-spatial datasets including the [color=#089c9 !important]Gridded Population of the World and [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Global Earthquake Hazard Distribution are linked by the Socio-Economic Data and Applications Center ([color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]SEDAC) at Columbia University. [thanks to[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Yanos Zylberberg at PSE for the link]

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]National Geophysical Data Center(NGDC) provides "geophysical data from the Sun to the Earth and Earth's sea floor and solid earth environment, including Earth observations from space". This includes data on natural hazards, such as the 'Global Significant Earthquake Database, 2150 B.C. to present' and 'The Significant Volcanic Eruption Database' among others. Other intriguing categories for data are 'Space Weather' and 'Bathymetry' (the study of underwater depth of lake or ocean floors). Download as ArcIMS interactive maps, tab-delimited data files or just plain-old html.

The Global Trade Policy Analysis group at the AgEcon Department of Purdue University provides a number of datasets related to trade but also climate change and geography. "The GTAP Data Base is a [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]fully documented, publicly available global data base which contains complete bilateral trade information, transport and protection linkages among [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]113 regions for all [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]57 GTAP commodities for a single year (2004 in the case of the GTAP 7 Data Base)." Single academic user licenses for GTAP 7 are $520, but a large number of free datasets (including summaries of GTAP, Social Accounting Matrix [SAM] extraction, the Global [bilateral] FDI Dataset, [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Project on Bilateral Labor Migration, CO2 emissions) can be found [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]here.

The Global Environment Monitoring Unit (GEM), one of seven scientific units that make up the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) [so I could have just said: The EC] provides a large number of [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]geo-spatial datasets. Topics include land cover, biodiversity and fire ([color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Global AVHRR fire probability map 1982-1999). One of the gems of this collection (no pun intended) is the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]global map of accessibility which charts travel time to major cities. [via [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]DEVECONDATA by Masa Kudamatsu]

[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Gridded Population of the World(version 3), constructed by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, provides spatial data on population around the world in 1990, 1995, 2000 with 2.5 arc-minute grid resolution [thanks to Masa at [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]DEVECONDATA for reporting this link].

The Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University in collaboration with Shanghai's Fudan University provides a large number of [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]historical GIS 'maps' for China: once mastered (no simple task) this type of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data allows for spatial analysis of Chinese development. You need to register but access is free, data is in shapefiles or xls or Access (depending on the dataset). There are a large number of datasets from the days of the Legalists and Qin Shihuang (221 BC) to the 1990s (AD).

The World Shipping Register provides free access to their [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]World Sea Ports database. For each country its ports' longitude, latitude and time zone are provided, for some port the maximum draft is also provided. Given the geospatial information this data could be used to calculate distance to closest port.

The PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency provides the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]History Database of the Global Environment(interestingly, the acronym is HYDE). HYDE presents (gridded) time series of population and land use for the last 12,000 years ! It also presents various other indicators such as GDP, value added, livestock, agricultural areas and yields, private consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and industrial production data, but only for the last century.

The Global Runoff Data Centre at BfG (sadly not the Big Friendly Giant but the German Bundesanstalt für Gewässerkunde) provides access to [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]data on global hydrological data. "The initial dataset of monthly river discharge data over a period of several years around 1980 was supplemented with the 'UNESCO monthly river discharge data collection 1965-85'. Today the database comprises discharge data of more than 7.000 gauging stations from all over the world. Since 1993 the total number of station-years has increased by a factor of around 10." 'Standard services' include Freshwater Fluxes into the World Oceans, Major River Basins of the World and Long-Term Mean Monthly Discharges. [this data features in the work by[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Abhishek Chakravarty at UCL/Essex.]

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) hosts the global lakes and wetlands database (GLWD) which has been developed in partnership with the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Center for Environmental Systems Research, University of Kassel, Germany. It is available for download as three separate ArcView layers (two polygon shapefiles and one grid). [via [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]DEVECONDATA by Masa Kudamatsu]

Matthew Ciolek at Australian National University edits the site for the [color=#089c9 !important]Old World Trade Routes (OWTRAD) Project: "This site supports online research in the field of dromography and provides a public-access electronic archive of geo/chrono-referenced data on land, river and maritime trade routes of Eurasia and Africa during the period 10,000 BCE - circa 1820 CE." The files are published in CSV, MapInfo and Google Earth (KML) formats, downloadable by region. There's also a link to the Trade Routes Resources [color=#089c9 !important]blog [via Masa Kudamatsu's [color=#089c9 !important]DevEconData blog]

More gravity data from Jon Haveland: great circle distance between capital cities for 176 countries, provided on his[color=#089c9 !important]website. He also offers contiguity data, i.e. [color=#089c9 !important]information on which countries share a common border or a small body of water border, for 176 countries (including the GDR and other Soviet Bloc countries). Finally: [color=#089c9 !important]language data for 176 countries. All of these files are text files.

The [color=#089c9 !important]Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (much in the news recently) has longitudial data on Temperature and Precipitation (both gridded geospatial) - if you know how to whittle these massive datasets down to national data, they might be quite useful.

Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes provide the [color=#089c9 !important]data to go with their 1998 Nature article entitled 'Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the past Six Centuries'. There are annual grid-ed temperature data for 1730-1980 and even longer time series going back to the 1400s. [Thanks to [color=#089c9 !important]James Fenske at Oxford for pointing out this database]

Diego Puga at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies (IMDEA) provides [color=#089c9 !important]data on 'terrain ruggedness' (the Terrain Ruggedness Index was originally devised by Riley, DeGloria, and Elliot (1999) to quantify topographic heterogeneity in wildlife habitats providing concealment for preys and lookout posts) which is used in a paper of Diego's with Nathan Nunn. The data (which also includes some other geographical variables) is in Stata format.

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center provides various data for the [color=#089c9 !important]Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP). Most interesting should prove the Global Monthly Merged Precipitation Analyses of GPCP available 1979-present day.

UNEP has a convenient [color=#089c9 !important]database offering access to a large number of datasets from the World Bank and UN organisations - the vast majority of these seem to be freely accessible. They have extensive data on Geography & Environment, including some geospatial datasets.

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) has produced a [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Crop Atlas of the World: "The map shows derived estimates of the spatial distribution and productivity of crops for 10-km grids using a novel allocation approach involving the fusion of sub-national crop production statistics. The values in this digital [map] are the number of harvested hectares within each 10 km grid cell. This data includes area harvested in multiple season (therefore this is NOT the physical harvested area, but rather the total area harvested) [...] The sub-national crop production data comes from agricultural censuses and surveys and has scaled values, so as to obtain national production estimates that were compatible with the annual average FAO national crop statistics for 1999-2001. The prototype crop distribution database used in this study is available from the authors upon request but is currently being regenerated using newer and additional data sources (including revisions based on expert validation) and an enhanced allocation algorithm." If you have Google Earth you can look at these data maps.

The Norwegian Centre for the Study of Civil War within the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) has a number of datasets relating to [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]geography and resource endowment. These include data on diamond resources, petroleum resources, length of international boundaries, minimum distance between countries, and data on rivers/river basins shared between countriess.

Cross-country data on the environment is covered in one of the datasets provided by Andrew Rose of Haas Business School, UCB. This is the dataset associated with the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]"Is Trade Good or Bad for the Environment? Sorting out the Causality"paper and has information on emissions, bird species, threatened species, water quality, and many more variables. Andrew also provides a huge number of geographical data and other standard and non-standard cross-country regression type variable (religion, institutions, diversity,...) from 1960 to 2000 for up to 208 countries (decadal data). This can be found in 'data12.dta' in the files associated with the "Size Really Doesn’t Matter: In Search of a National Scale Effect" paper.

The WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) maintains an [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]International Emergency Events Database called EM-DAT which covers all sorts of disasters, including natural ones (drought, floods, insect infestation), from the early 20th century to the present day. The data can be presented on an annual basis for 'people affected', 'injured', 'homeless' or 'deaths' from the distaster-type specified and downloaded in excel format.

[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Sea-level rise and [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]storm-surge intensification data compiled by Susmita Dasgupta at the World Bank. The former assesses consequences of continued SLR for 84 coastal developing countries, providing data on the impacted land area, population, GDP, agricultural area, urban area and wetlands if sea-levels rise by 1 to 5 meters (excel worksheets). The latter considers the potential impact of a large (1-in-100-year) storm surge by contemporary standards, and then compares it with its 10% intensification which is expected to occur in this century. Again the impact on land area etc. is provided.

Energy and Natural Resources
The World Bank [color=#089c9 !important]Wealth of Nations dataset provides country-level data on comprehensive wealth, adjusted net saving and non-renewable resource rents indicators. It presents a set of “wealth accounts” for over 150 countries for 1995, 2000, and 2005 which allows a longer-term assessment of global, regional and country performance in building wealth. Adjusted Net Saving (takes into account CO2 damages, natural resource depletion etc.) and non-renewable resource rent (oil, gas, tin, copper, etc.) indicators are calculated annually from 1970 to 2008.

The International Energy Association has compiled the [color=#089c9 !important]Joint Oil Data Initiative (JODI), which provides data for up to 90 countries, although it centres its attention on the 30 largest oil producers and consumers. The time-series goes back to January 2002 (monthly data) and covers stocks, imports/exports, refinery output and other relevant variables for crude oil, liquified gas, diesel, and other oil products. They are planning a similar database (InterEnerStat) for all fuels and flows.

The Norwegian Centre for the Study of Civil War within the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) has a number of datasets relating to [color=#089c9 !important]geography and resource endowment. These include data on diamond resources, petroleum resources, length of international boundaries, minimum distance between countries, and data on rivers/river basins shared between countriess.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN publishes [color=#089c9 !important]AquaStat which represents a "global information system on water and agriculture, developed by the Land and Water Division. The main mandate of the programme is to collect, analyze and disseminate information on water resources, water uses, and agricultural water management with an emphasis on countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean." A bit more specifically, the main Aquastat database reports 70 variables under the headings 'Land use and population', 'Climate and water resources', 'Water use (by sector and by source)', 'Irrigation and drainage development' and 'Environment and health' for 5-year intervals from 1958-1962 onwards for a large number of countries. Other databases include the excellent 'Geo-referenced database on dams' and data on 'River sediment yields'. The data can be exported in CSV format.

The Global Runoff Data Centre at BfG (sadly not the Big Friendly Giant but the German Bundesanstalt für Gewässerkunde) provides access to [color=#089c9 !important]data on global hydrological data. "The initial dataset of monthly river discharge data over a period of several years around 1980 was supplemented with the 'UNESCO monthly river discharge data collection 1965-85'. Today the database comprises discharge data of more than 7.000 gauging stations from all over the world. Since 1993 the total number of station-years has increased by a factor of around 10." 'Standard services' include Freshwater Fluxes into the World Oceans, Major River Basins of the World and Long-Term Mean Monthly Discharges. [this data features in the work by[color=#089c9 !important]Abhishek Chakravarty at UCL/Essex.]