Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

August 2008

Title: OECD Factbook 2008
Publisher: OECD
Cost: free
URL: http://www.sourceOECD.org/factbook
Reviewed: April–September, 2008

THE CONTEXT

There are many publications that provide reasonably current statistics about the demographic, geographic, political, economic, health, military and environmental status of countries. Encyclopedias—if they are regularly and comprehensively updated—can be a good resource for finding basic statistics about these aspects of all the countries. The same is true about the CIA World Factbook, which has gone through great improvements in the past 15 years both in the print, and especially in its free Web edition. Neither of these, however, offer at-a-glance comparison of countries by some of the most essential indicators and neither present the statistics as time series across a time period.

Other ready-reference sources focus on particular aspects of countries and regions, such as the financial profiles of countries, as does very well the World Bank Group. Some topical areas of high concern in aiding the least developed countries, such as the miserable essential health and educational conditions in well over 100 countries, would deserve much more current and much better accessible relevant statistical data from the responsible agencies. If half as much competence and labor of love (and yes, money) would have gone into the development of the most critical statistical databases of many of the large international organizations in charge of essential welfare issues as went into the current edition of the OECD Factbook, decisionmakers would have been much better informed in allocating funds to the countries in dire straits.

This free online edition is welcome for its sheer content, and very welcome for its exceptionally good, a state of the art implementation. The Factbook is also available in a pretty book format for $50, but it can’t even hold a candle to the smart and beautiful Web version. The Web page about the book in the digital bookstore of OECD suggests an alternative version on a USB drive, but oddly it remains silent about the splendid Web version.

THE CONTENT

OECD has, of course, a much narrower subject and geographical scope than the general encyclopedias and the factbooks and almanacs of universal coverage. It has a mission of almost instant gratification, the promotion of economic co-operation and development among its—currently—30 member countries. Most of them are highly above in every regards of most of the other 200 countries/territories which are not part of OECD. This, however, does not take away from the achievements of the outstanding —and partly free—digital time series of OECD. The OECD Factbook is just one of the dozens of statistical resources in the rich SourceOECD collection (http://www.sourceoecd.org).

Data for many of the indicators are available from 1970— at least for most of the 20 countries that founded the OECD: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S. Turkey stands out from this group, as since the Ottoman era it has never been among the world’s most economically developed countries. Actually, I vividly remember from the early 1980s the enormous influx of guest workers from Turkey to Germany to have a better life (not for themselves as “Gastarbeiter”, but for their family at home).

One of the many beauties of the OECD Factbook is that I can support factually my seemingly subjective and possibly politically incorrect statements which make my editors cringe. In this case, I could locate and check the data in 30 seconds, then download, reformat and re-sort an Excel table from the OECD Factbook in five minutes to prove clearly that my statement above that the economy in Turkey was by far the poorest among the OECD members in 1981 through a rather telling indicator, the Gross National Income Per Capita. The 1960s may not have been better, but data are available “only” from 1970.

As can be seen from the screen shot, Turkish GNI in 1981 was less than half that of Portugal and Ireland, less than a third of Spain, UK and Greece (ouch), less than a quarter of Italy, Norway, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Sweden and less than a fifth of Iceland, the U.S. and Switzerland.

Looking at the data of the year 2006 within the same spreadsheet which covers nearly four decades for two thirds of the 30 countries, it is easy to see that the relative rank of Turkey got worse (even if its GNI grew, actually quadrupled) — it still has the lowest GNI per capita of the now 30 OECD member countries, even though OECD now includes other countries which are rarely associated with economic star performance, such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

To be fair, Turkey is actually ranked the 26th not the 30th, because four countries did not provide data for their GNI). Such non-compliance may undermine the purpose of OECD, and it is certainly one of its shortcomings that some member countries have a nonchalant approach to the yearly reporting.

The most surprising one is Luxembourg, one of the founding members, the principality which is almost as big as Rhode Island, and as highly populated as Staten Island. It stands out in the country lists with some of its economic and science and technology indicators. I think not that much for the extraordinary abilities of its native workforce or of its resident thinkforce (to borrow a term from the vocabulary of OECD used for the workers engaged in research and development), but primarily for the work of the commuting workers from neighboring Germany, France and Belgium who get to work from their homeland in less time even with crossing the border than I get to my university, crossing the Pali Highway (but my view is much better during the ride, especially in winter).

Working in Luxembourg from nine to five, and actually living in one of the neighboring countries near the border, favors considerably the various productivity and income indicators of Luxembourg. Among others, it stands out in filing patents because those numbers are chalked up to the employers’ country code, i.e. Luxembourg, not to the individual inventors’ country of residence.

There are time series for more than 100 indicators. These are arranged in 12 major categories, covering Population, Macroeconomic trends, Economic globalization, Prices, Energy. Labor, Science and technology, Environment, Education, Public finance, Quality of life and Productivity. The variety of indicators is mouthwatering, it includes the most common ones that you would need to look up in several other statistical databases, and often without the perspective of seeing the change of the indicator values across the years through a fairly long time span.

I must repeat here that not all the data are available for all countries, and for 10 countries the data is mostly available from the year when they were admitted to the OECD. Of course, not all data was requested annually, so the picture is better than it may seem to the casual visitor, and from my experience, there are subscription-based factographic databases that have far more holes in them.

It is also to be noted that the 2008 Factbook has statistics up to 2006. Such time lags (and higher) are typical in every statistical compendia. Then again, for some indicators the time span goes back much further, and in a few cases goes much ahead — as it happens, for example with population data and estimates, covering 100 years from 1950 to 2050.

The emphasis is on economic activities and status, which is no surprise. There is no major category for health, because it is part of the major category, Quality of life. The same is true for Transportation that is also a subcategory within Quality of life. There are some indicators which are absent (partially because they were not pervasive in the founding countries, such as maternal mortality), but it would be useful to see more data about poverty, gender inequality, illiteracy which hinder economic growth in some of the countries that were admitted in the past few years, and especially in some of those countries which are potential candidates for becoming members, and are in enhanced engagement with OECD, such as China, India, South Africa, or OECD started accession talks with, such as Russia.

One other category where more indicators would be needed is Science and technology. It is useful to learn about the number of patents granted since 1990 by the U.S., European and Japan patent offices, the so-called triadic patent families, but the number of journal articles published and cited would be as important to characterize the research and development activities of OECD member countries, at least from 1990. OECD made it clear that it is beyond its capacity to collect such data, but the information could be licensed for incorporation in the OECD Factbook for the 30 member countries from Thomson Reuters.

It would have been useful to include from another OECD publication the 2007 edition of the Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard at least the indicators for scientific articles per million inhabitants, and for the Relative prominence of cited scientific literature These data are taken from the excellent open access digital library of the National Science Foundation (which I will review soon). In turn, these statistics were created from the special National Indicators citation database of Thomson Science.

Such precious information about the—mostly—scholarly publishing productivity and impact of countries has recently become freely available through the Spanish Scimago Group. This group of bibliometricians and scientometricians has developed a set of excellently designed, informative, content-rich and visually very appealing databases from the Scopus database for 200+ countries and territories (and from the ISI special citation database subsets a mini Atlas of Science for Spain, Portugal and eight Central and South American countries).

However, in spite of my praise for this high-brow and practical project, there is a catch when relying on Scopus data for creating country performance indexes and profiles. According to my tests in the Scopus database which has more than 35.1 million records, there is no information about the country affiliation(s) of author(s) in about 12 million records. This is more than a third of the entire Scopus database. As the typical scholarly article has more than one author, the impact of the volume of omission of country names is larger than it may seem to be at first. This still may distort the scientific productivity portrait of some countries.. (I will write about the otherwise excellent Scimago database in an upcoming column).

THE SOFTWARE

OECD Factbook has an outstanding software, way beyond the appealing and intuitive interface, including excellent browse, search and output features. Its designers went out of their way not only to present the output tables in the most flexible and compact way, but enhance them with additional features to spoil the users rotten. The succinct but illuminating text capsules about an indicator is enriched by additional presentation format in the best way I can think of.

It is much appreciated that the tables can be downloaded directly as an Excel file and in PDF format as well. Some of the data also are available as charts, and not just any chart but animated and highly customizable charts. For example, the Gross National Income per Capita data set that I mentioned above is available as an animated chart. Unmistakable and obvious user controls allow the users to customize the display of the chart, including the control of the animation speed which makes good use of the time series, in showing the changes of an indicator across the years. My static screen shot does not do justice to this smart feature. It is essential to go through the experience by visiting these summary pages about GNI and triadic patents for a taster and to prepare for seeing the latest addition to this superb software which makes statistical tables a joy to read, or more like to watch unfolding in front of your eyes.=gIt demonstrates the technology awareness and competence of the developers of the OECD digital library, that they have applied for Digital Object Identifiers for many of the essential statistical tables, and publish these links, called StatLink below the tables, charts and graphs for instant and permanent access. I already slipped in a DOI earlier in this review to take the readers to the OECD/NSF statistics about scientific articles, but here is another one and a screen shot for female life expectancy. This is smart and applaudable foresight that many users will benefit from.

It is more than icing on the cake that the developers of OECD Factbook have added the outstanding Trendalyzer program to the set of software options, This addition should deserve a much more prominent position to alert all the users of this gem. It can be used to produce animated statistics that show the change of values of two variables across time. Again, the best way to enjoy the visualization offered by this masterpiece of Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician who in his free time in rural Africa where he tracked the paralytic disease, konzo, developed and made freely available a spreadsheet-based animation software that the army of programmers at Microsoft and Google have never thought of, let alone developed. The version this link will take you to is filled with the content of the World Factbook, so all you have to do is select two indicators and see how they correlate and how they have increased/decreased throughout the years.

It requires the installation of the Flash program and if you are not allowed to install software on your office PC here is a screen shot showing how good was the return on investment of an increasing share of the Gross Domestic Product of Australia into Research and Development (from 0.96% to 1.78%) in terms of the increase of the number of full time researchers by 1,000 employee from (3.8 to 8.4) in Australia from 1981 to 2004 (the last year data is available). As you play the spreadsheet, bubbles of different color and size, representing the regions and countries selected and their population, flow and swirl around as the year-clock is ticking to show the passage of time.

The OECD Factbook is a richly enhanced, state-of-the-art ready-reference source that visualizes a huge amount of statistical data that will please even the iPod generation with its smart and efficient visualization of data.