data

There's been much talk in recent months about the revision of the International Comparison Program and the PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) figures derived from it. The Bank's China Quarterly Update launched in early February included a special section on the implications of this revision for China, and our own David Dollar explained here that the new PPPs show poverty in China has in fact reduced more than previously calculated.

For more details and full estimates, check out this site that includes explanatory sections on the Poverty PPPs, the methodology used, and the final results for Asia. Also, you can create and download your own data query here.

The World Bank's EdStats (Education Statistics) collects worldwide data on education from national statistical reports, statistical annexes of new publications, and other data sources. The database has just been updated and its Query tool offers preliminary education indicators for the 2006 school year (with new imput from 93 countries) and the 2007 school year (nine countries).

Check out the interactive Query tool to customize reports by country (or group of countries), choosing from more than 100 indicators over many years. And put your results in a chart or map that you can export to use in your own documents and reports.

In the Bank's recent China macro quarterly we included an appendix on the implications of the new PPP estimates for poverty analysis in China (PPP or Purchasing Power Parity).  Perhaps because it was an appendix it did not receive much attention. 

The new PPPs reveal that prices are about 40 percent higher than had been assumed under the old PPP, which was an academic guestimate.  Some researchers immediately applied the new PPP conversion factor for GDP to household data and came up with hugely higher estimates of the $1 per day poverty rate for China.  However, the World Bank does not use the GDP conversion factor in measuring poverty.  The research department of the bank will produce a conversion factor for poverty analysis that takes account of two important things:

(1) the basket actually consumed by the poor is different from the GDP basket; and

(2) the poor almost exclusively live in rural areas where prices are lower. 

According to the Bank's recently published Migration and Remittances Factbook, the Top 10 remittance recipients in East Asia & Pacific in 2007 were: China ($25.7 bn), Philippines ($17.0 bn), Indonesia ($6.0 bn), Vietnam ($5.0 bn), Thailand ($1.7 bn), Malaysia ($1.7 bn), Cambodia ($0.3 bn), Mongolia ($0.2 bn), Fiji ($0.2 bn), Myanmar ($0.1 bn).