ECON 3063: Women in Development Economics

Afrobarometer is non-partisan, pan-African research institution conducting public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, the economy and society in 30+ countries repeated on a regular cycle. A leading source of high-quality data on what Africans are thinking.

The AmericasBarometer, LAPOP’s largest survey research project, is a periodic study of 34 countries in the Western Hemisphere, with stratified nationally representative samples drawn in each country, a common questionnaire core, and country-specific modules. It is the only scientifically rigorous comparative survey of democratic values and behaviors that covers all independent countries in North, Central, and South America, as well as a significant number of countries in the Caribbean. The AmericasBarometer measures attitudes, evaluations, experiences, and behavior in the Americas using national probability samples of voting-age adults. Standardizing methods and a common core questionnaire permit valid comparisons across countries and over time on topics including the economy, rule of law, state capacity, trust in institutions, individual values, corruption, security, and more. The AmericasBarometer was launched in 2004/05, with 11 countries, and quickly grew to cover 34 countries in the Americas. The latest round of the AmericasBarometer was carried out in 2021 and includes over 64,000 interviews in 22 countries.

Arab Barometer is a nonpartisan research network that provides insight into the social, political, and economic attitudes and values of ordinary citizens across the Arab world. We have been conducting high quality and reliable public opinion surveys in the Middle East and North Africa since 2006. We are the longest-standing and the largest repository of publicly available data on the views of men and women in the MENA region. Our findings give a voice to the needs and concerns of Arab publics.

AsianBarometer represents the largest ever, comparative survey in Asia, covering East, Southeast, South and Central Asia. It focuses on daily lives of ordinary people (bumi putra) and their relationships to family, neighborhood, workplace, social and political institutions and market place. Country-wide face-to-face surveys use standardized instruments designed around a common research framework.

Links to some of the most useful and popular economics data sources, categorized by data type

DHS are nationally-representative household surveys that provide data for a wide range of monitoring and impact evaluation indicators in the areas of population, health, and nutrition. You can find data on knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Step-by-step guidelines for dataset users from registration to dataset analysis are available. Datasets are available for free after a simple registration process.

The Spatial Data Repository provides geographically-linked health and demographic data from the DHS Program.

DIVA-GIS is a free computer program for mapping and geographic data analysis (a geographic information system (GIS). With DIVA-GIS you can make maps of the world, or of a very small area, using, for example, state boundaries, rivers, a satellite image, and the locations of sites where an animal species was observed. We also provide free spatial data for the whole world that you can use in DIVA-GIS or other programs.

The Gender Statistics database is a comprehensive source for the latest sex-disaggregated data and gender statistics covering demography, education, health, access to economic opportunities, public life and decision-making, and agency.

Latinobarómetro is an annual public opinion survey that involves some 19,000 interviews in 18 Latin American countries, representing more than 400 million inhabitants.

The Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) is a household survey program housed within the Survey Unit of the World Bank's Development Data Group that provides technical assistance to national statistical offices (NSOs) in the design and implementation of multi-topic household surveys. Since its inception in the early 1980s, the LSMS program has worked with dozens of statistics offices around the world: generating high-quality data, incorporating innovative technologies and improved survey methodologies, and building technical capacity. The LSMS team also provides technical support across the World Bank in the design and implementation of household surveys and in the measurement and monitoring of poverty.

Free, open-source global issues data such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality indicators. Our World in data is an online scientific publication that works on making progress against the world’s largest problems by providing research and data about it. The publication is a collaborative efforts between researchers of University of Oxford and non-profit organization Global Change Data Lab.

The primary World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources. It presents the most current and accurate global development data available, and includes national, regional and global estimates.

The World Values Survey is a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life, led by an international team of scholars, with the WVS association and secretariat headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. The survey, which started in 1981, seeks to use the most rigorous, high-quality research designs in each country. The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire. The WVS is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, currently including interviews with almost 400,000 respondents. Moreover the WVS is the only academic study covering the full range of global variations, from very poor to very rich countries, in all of the world’s major cultural zones.