Introduction

Growth and development data are economic indicators related to aggregate measures of output produced by a country. These include gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national product (GNP), either measured at level, growth, or per capital figures.

Web-based resources

World Development Indicators

The World Bank provides global development data through the World Development Indicators (WDI) database. In WDI, we can find:

• GDP (current US$)
• GDP growth (annual %)
• GDP per capital (current US$)
• GNI, either measured by Atlas method (current US$) or purchasing power parity (PPP) (current international $)
• GNI per capita, either measured by Atlas method (current US$) or purchasing power parity PPP (current international $)

For Stata users, life will be easier if one can utilise the two main commands to download WDI data into a Stata file as follows:

• wbopendata (please see Accesing World Bank Open Data in Stata) 
• wdireshape (please see Jeanty. 2010. Using the world development indicators database for statistical analysis in Stata. The Stata Journal, Vol. 10, Number 1, pp. 30-45.)

Penn World Table

Penn World Table, also well-known as PWT, provides international comparison data on relative levels of income, output, inputs and productivity. PWT database covers 167 countries over the period 1950 and 2011. The current version is 8.0 where we can find:

• Real GDP, employment and population levels
• Current price GDP, capital and TFP
• National accounts-based variables
• Exchange rates and GDP price levels
• Shares in Output-side real GDP at current PPPs
• Price levels, expenditure categories and capital

The PWT data can be downloaded in several formats: Stata, MS Excel and Matlab. 

International Financial Statistics

The most relevant database in International Financial Statistics (IFS) related to growth and development indicators is World Gross Domestic Product