Global Development Finance 2004 on the Virtual Data Center
Graduate Statistical Assistant Program, ATS
The Virtual Data Center interface to The World Bank’s
Global Development Finance
(2004 edition) allows you to select the series you want to retrieve, for specified time periods,
via a web browser. Please note that will need a valid BC username and password in order to access the data. You need not use SQL nor have a special computer account to use this interface.
The data are either displayed in your browser or, more usefully, downloaded as a text file to your
desktop system. A Stata program is provided that will transform
the data to a more usable format. However, use of these data in any other package or spreadsheet is
equally feasible, since the data are in text form.
This dataset contains up to
218 annual ‘indicators,’ or variables, for 137 countries
and groupings of countries over the 39 years 1970-2008.
These data also may be directly accessed as a Stata dataset.
To use the database interface, you choose:
- the categories of series from which series are to be chosen,
- the specific series to be retrieved from those categories,
- the countries and/or groups of countries for which data are desired,
- and the first and last years.
After making these selections, you are given a summary of your retrieval request (which you should print for
further reference), and offered the choice to either Display Data or Download Data. If you Display
the data, it will appear in an HTML table in the web browser. Data in an HTML table are not machine-readable;
this option is provided only for convenience. To work with the data, use the Download option. Note well the
warning that if you retrieve more than one file to your desktop, the files must be renamed to prevent
corruption. These text files can be accessed by any text editor, word processor or spreadsheet. A Stata do-file,
wdfdata.do, is also provided to reformat (reshape) the data from the downloaded form to a panel format.
You are urged to retrieve a reasonable number of series and time periods. A request to retrieve a sizable
fraction of the dataset may fail due to limitations of the hardware and software being used for database handling.
Last updated: 25 October 2004 ATS