Recreational Data – Could I Answer a Written Question My MP Asked?

Via one of my feeds from TheyWorkForYou, I noticed this written answer to a question my MP, Andrew Turner, asked of the Secretary of State for International Development:

I’ve been playing around with development data lately, trying to sketch together some pieces for an OpenLearn course on data visualisation for development (hopefully!), so I thought this would be a good test of how quickly I could find the data and confirm the results.

Working backwards, GDP data (in various adjusted forms) is available from the World Bank API, which I’ve been accessing via the remote data interface calls in pandas (for example, Easy Access to World Bank and UN Development Data from IPython Notebooks).

So where do get the aid ranking from?

There are two ways of doing this – one to look for local UK sources (eg from DFID perhaps), the other to look for international sources of data. The advantage of the former is that these are presumably the sources that whoever answered the question went to. The advantage of the latter is that we should be able to generalise the question to query similar rankings for aid distributed by other countries.

“Official Development Assistance” seems to be a key phrase, with a quick websearch for that phrase and the term “data” turning up this Aid statistics – charts, tables and databases resource page, which in turn points to a whole raft of datatables as Excel files detailing statistics on resource flows to developing countries; the International Development Statistics (IDS) online databases page links to several more general online databases. (There’s also a beta data.oecd.org site.)

Forsaking the raw data files for a minute, the site claims that “the Query Wizard for International Development Statistics [QWIDS] is the easiest way to search our database as it automatically extracts the most appropriate dataset from OECD.Stat to match your search” – so let’s try that… QWIDS.

Nice and simple then…?!

A bit of tinkering (setting the donor, unticking recipients so only countries – rather than countries and groupings are included) gives what I think is the data for the aid disbursements from the UK to other countries, data I could export as a CSV file; but there are no tools onsite to help me look at the top 10.

Poking around, it looks like the data’s also there to allow us to look at disbursements (or perhaps just allocations) by donor country and sector into a particular country? Maybe?! This would then let us see how aid was being allocated from the UK to the top 10 recipients, broken down by sector, which might be more illuminating? I also wonder if there are any relationships between aid paid by donors into a particular sector, and imports into the recipient country from the donor country within the same sectors? For this, we need trade data breakdowns. (We can get total flows between countries (I think?!) but I’m not sure how to find the data broken down by sector?)

The stats.oecd.org site does let us sort, but I couldn’t find an easy or clean way to limit results to countries, and exclude groupings:

The order (of aid disbursements from the UK in 2012) has the same rank order as the response to my MP’s question.

For the GDP and GDP per capita data, we can go to the World Bank:

Note a couple of things – units tend to be given in US dollars rather than Sterling; there are all sorts of US dollars… (see for example Accounting for Inflation – Deflators, or “What Does ‘Prices in Real Terms’ Actually Mean?”).

Hmm… maybe it would have been easier to find the data on the DFID site instead…

PS Indeed it was – Statistics on International Development 2013 – Tables has a link to a dataset that contains the league table: “Table 4: Top Twenty Recipients UK Net Bilateral ODA 2010 – 2012”.