Download World Statistics day: Time for congratulations

Angus Deaton, Princeton University
WORLD STATISTICS DAY:
TIME FOR CONGRATULATIONS &
FOR REFLECTION
Successes
 Here in the World Bank, I should say something
about the 2005 round of the ICP
 One great success
 Extensions of content
 Implementing a broad welfare agenda
 Health as well as wealth
 Well-being seen more broadly
 Talk about achievements in comparability
 Extensions in availability
 Another Bank success
2005 Round of the ICP
 For academics, internationally comparable
accounts are among the most important of all
development data sets
 World Development Indicators
 Penn World Table
 ICP 2005 huge improvement over ICP 1993
 Central control, general management of WB
 Integrated global system
 1993 round had lost credibility: uncoordinated regions
 Changed our view of the world
Broadening scope
 Development is about broad based improvement
 Income is important
 So are other parts of well-being
 Health, education, life evaluation, emotional well-
being, mental health
 Major improvements in measurement,
availability, and comparability of such data world
wide
 Empirical implementation of the Sen agenda
 Deprivation and well-being in broad spaces
Examples
 System of Demographic and Health Surveys
 Recently a major tool for health assessment in
poverty, deprivation, and health
 Major source for infant and child mortality
 In countries without complete vital statistics
 Most of the poor countries in the world
 Also weighs and measures children (and
increasingly) adults
 Documentation of malnourishment around the world
 All of this is on a naturally comparable basis
 One of my favorite examples: height of women. .
170
Europe
165
Central Asia
Africa
160
155
150
China
South Asia
Latin America
& Caribbean
145
Average height
US
6
7
8
Log of real GDP per head in year of birth
9
10
6
Other important examples
 DHS is only one example
 And researchers have a lot of catching up to do
 Many others
 WHO World Health Surveys
 UNICEF MICS Surveys
 These like DHS easily available and downloadable
 Many more income and expenditure household
surveys exist and many more available
 World Bank leadership of International Household
Survey Network
 Helping to standardize, store, disseminate
 Technical support for metadata & standardization
Database for development
 World Development Indicators, with many millions
of subscribers worldwide
 Open Data Initiative
 WDI is new openly available on line
 Anyone in the world with access to the internet can
instantly access these data
 Takes us beyond academics (who were OK) to
governments, NGOs, journalists, around the world
 Includes other Bank data, projects, and data tools
 Exactly the sort of global public goods that the
World Bank should be providing
 Likely to greatly expand and improve development
discourse, nationally and internationally
Private sector too
 Gallup World Poll aim is to sample all the population
of the world
 Since 2006, run identical surveys in 155 countries
 National samples of 1,000 or so in each country
 Most countries surveyed in most years
 Many hard to survey countries, e.g. Myanmar, China, Cuba,
36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa
 Collects detailed data on self-reported well-being
 Emotional experience as well as life-evaluation
 Demographics
 Income (much better than one might think)
 These data fill an important gap in the world
 But they are proprietary and a Gallup commercial asset
Outstanding tasks
 Mortality data are seriously incomplete
 Especially in the poorest countries, especially for adults
 “imputing” data from best sources is useful, but not a
substitute
 WHO world mortality database is a great resources (underused) but not useful for the countries where it is most
needed
 Household survey data
 Used to be the leaders, now lagging
 Major inconsistencies (e.g. rate of growth) with NAS
 LSMS project did many important things, but never could
produce internationally comparable surveys (like DHS for
example)
 The next big priority
More outstanding
 National accounts
 Very weak in many poor countries
 Very weak in some not-so poor, rapidly growing
countries
 I have argued that growth transitions put special strains
on old systems, including possible overstatement of GDP
growth rates, for example.
 SNA may assure comparability, but adherence to SNA
is variable from one country to another
 Reconciliation with household surveys has to be open
to revision of NAS
 Politically difficult to revise down fast growth rates
Improving national accounts
 For ICP, technical assistance to improve national
accounts is now seen as central
 With more regular ICP, large revisions are going to be
harder to defend
 Sarkozy Commission challenges
 To many currently existing treatments in GDP
 More dialog between economists & NA statisticians
 To develop better “green” accounting
 To develop measures of self-reported well-being
 Ready to move from academia to statistical offices
 US example: well-being module in ATUS about to be
released
Thank you!
 Especially for inviting a user to participate in
these discussions today