A Guide to International and U.S. Statistics Sources: Economic Development Indicators, Foreign Aid and Direct Investment

The AidData live website and latest research release contain information on development finance activities. The primary variables are compiled from a range of sources, including the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS) database, donor annual reports, project documents from both bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, data gathered directly from donor agency sources, and agency websites and databases.

From OECD Data Explorer

Includes Direct Investment Flows
Annual: (FDI) inflows and outflows by individual country, geographical region and economic grouping, expressed in millions of dollars
Direct Investment Stock: Inward and outward stock by individual country, geographical region and economic grouping, expressed in millions of dollars, as FDI world shares, as FDI values per capita, and as FDI percentage ratios.

Data is free, but users must create an account.
The International Trade Centre has developed five online tools — Trade Map (trade data extends back to 2000), Market Access Map, Investment Map (Foreign Direct Investment back to 2000), Trade Competitiveness Map and Standards Map — that enable companies and trade support institutions to identify export/import opportunities and compare market-access requirements (e.g. tariffs, official market regulations and other non-tariff measures, and private voluntary standards such as organic certification or FAIRTRADE). See more at: Oveview

Gini, poverty, income, Methods and Concepts.
"To benchmark and monitor income inequality and poverty across countries, the OECD relies on a dedicated statistical database: the OECD Income Distribution Database which offers data on levels and trends in Gini coefficients before and after taxes and transfers, average and median household disposable incomes, relative poverty rates and poverty gaps, before and after taxes and transfers, etc." [publisher page]
Please note: Data from this site is migrating to the new platform, OECD Data Explorer. As of April 2024, not all of the information has migrated. Access to the OECD IDD via OECD.stat will be turned off in May 2024. See: Access via OECD Data Explorer.

This URL is to the new platform for International Development Statistics.

"The Pacific Aid Map has collected data on close to 13,000 projects in 14 countries supplied by 62 donors from 2011 onwards. All data has been made freely available on this interactive platform, allowing users to investigate and manipulate the information in a variety of ways.
Information about the data can be found in the About page. All values are in in current USD.

"PWT version 8.0 is a database with information on relative levels of income, output, inputs and productivity, covering 167 countries between 1950 and 2011. On this website, you find access to the data and documentation." [home page] The Penn World Table is primarily a dataset on real GDP, where ‘real’ indicates that GDP levels are made comparable across countries using purchasing power parities to convert to a common currency. [See Vox article and the User Guide for more information]

Agriculture, Crime, Education, Employment, Energy, Environment, Health, HIV/AIDS, Human Development, Industry, Information and Communication Technology, National Accounts, Population, Refugees, Tourism, Trade, as well as the Millennium Development Goals indicators.

UNIDO maintains a variety of databases comprising statistics of overall industrial growth, detailed data on business structure and statistics on major indicators of industrial performance by country in the historical time series. The databases are updated regularly with the most recent data. Release of the new edition of the databases is announced every year in May.

55 databases on a wide variety of financial and social statistics. Includes World Development Indicators, below, International Debt Statistics (formerly Global Development Finance), education, gender and health statistics, a poverty and equity database with statistics for 174 countries, back to 1974, and many more.

Development data covering more than 575 indicators, 225 countries, and 18 regional and income groups. The extensive collection of development data includes population, income, social, economic, financial, natural resources, and environmental indicators for more than forty years (starting in 1960 where data are available). There are hundreds of series (categories) available in the drop-down menus. The new interface walks you through the process of selecting country, series, and time variables. Offers the ability to create tables and extract data to a spreadsheet.