Just to spell out something that should be obvious: I doubt that World
Bank employees are going to be candid about data problems on a public
list, given a bundle of professional, ethical and political issues
arising from any disclosures. The same goes for employees of any other
data provider.
Nick
[email protected]
Nick Cox
Please don't start a new thread by replying to an existing thread on a
quite different topic.
Your examples lead me to think that you should be asking the World Bank,
or more generally the data provider, directly. It seems unlikely that
your kind of question would lend itself to discussion on a list.
As some World Bank employees are members of this list, they may be able
to advise further.
I've worked with such datasets occasionally in the past. My impression
is that the World Bank take comparability very seriously and realise as
much as anyone that like must be aligned with like. At the same time,
they are necessarily largely dependent on what individual countries do
and tell them.
Daniel Wilde
About a week ago I asked a questions on the Gini Coefficient which
didn't receive any replies - probably because it was about macroeconomic
statistics and not Stata as such.
Does anybody know of a list which is specifically aimed at people who
want to ask questions about data sources and the computation of
statistics. To my mind many of the international datasets such as World
Development Indicators are poorly referenced and it is unclear what the
actual original source of the data is and whether all countries used
consistent definitions. E.G. how did the World Bank calculate per capita
income for Chad, did they undertake a household survey, did they just
get the figure from another database, did Chad's government statistics
office calculate this. I am always reluctant to just plug the data in,
and it would be useful if there was some list where I could speak to
people who have looked into all this in detail.
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