Data - General issues
Data availability and quality
While on average in in general, the data are informative, the compilation highlights also several issues. Not all series are complete due to lack of comparable data for some countries, and particularly public and private domestic finance suffer from under-reporting. Also, the inconsistency of different data sources results in anomalies, eg where public international finance, private domestic finance or private international finance even exceed a country’s GDP (see example below). Such discrepancies can at the same time help to identify data weaknesses.
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Aiming for comparable data, the tables include public data sources with the most comprehensive country coverage, although for individual countries more detailed and accurate information may be available. Note that there are no national data on key aggregates for low income countries for 2000 and 2001, hence these years have not been included in the summary. Also, as time-series are not complete, the aggregates for country groupings are calculated as sums of available data, and not scaled to estimate the missing data. Therefore some fluctuations may reflect changes in the data availability.
Data sources
The data included in the file are expressed in USD millions at 2005 prices and have been calculated using two main sources:
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World Bank: World Development Indicators and International Debt Statistics
The Summary table for trends 2002-2011 and the more detailed data for year 2011 as an example of data issues can provide the basis for discussing the methodology and sources.
Comments
If you have general comments you are most welcome to use the "Comments" section below. On more specific issues, please ise the subsections for Public Domestic Finance, Public International Finance and Private Finance (covering both domestic and international finance).
Full datasets
If you are interested in the full set of calculations for each year, then the detailed methodology followed and the disaggregated data used are available in a downloadable .zip folder with the separate but linked Excel files here [dropbox, 500MB]. How the files are linked to the other is described in the figure below.
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