Website review: Vital statistics of the Western world

Originating in the reconstruction efforts that followed the Second World War, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has built up a vast mass of comparative international data about population trends, education, agriculture, health and other areas in its 30 member countries. Its decision to put this data into an online database will be welcomed by social scientists.

The home page is clearly laid out, and gives simple instructions on getting started. New users can dive in straightaway, although a downloadable user guide in PDF format helps with the more difficult queries.

On the home page, there are five main options ­ Search, Browse Themes, Browse Queries, Current Query, and Multi-Dataset Query ­ listed in a menu on the left. For most people, the easiest place to start is by clicking Browse Themes, which brings up a menu of broad areas: General Statistics, Agriculture and Fisheries, Demography and Population, Development, and so on. Each area you click
on expands to give further options until you reach the data you want.

Just for example
Choose the Demography and Population option, for example, and you can drill down to Population and Vital Statistics. This will bring up the population statistics for a single OECD country ­ in this case, it defaults to Australia, the first in the alphabetical list. A drop-down menu lets you see the data for any other OECD country. Metadata (the source of the statistics and other explanatory information) is displayed on the right of the screen, along with a contact name for more information.

The table is clearly laid out, showing population changes, such as numbers of births, deaths and net migration from 1995 to 2006. The menu on the left changes to give more options under Current Query, so you can choose to look at some, rather than all, dimensions of the data, viewing only births or deaths, for example, or looking at all the statistics for a particular year rather than all the years. You can also change the formatting by selecting the number of digits to be displayed after the decimal point, or hide empty rows and columns.

From the menu on the left, you can in theory save the query, returning to it at a later date to see the most recent data, which is updated in real time. I was unable to get this option working.
An Export option, also on the left-hand menu, lets you export the table in Excel format. For bigger files, you can ask for the data to be emailed to you in comma-separated format.

One feature many users will find useful is the Multi-Dataset Query, which can combine data from different datasets. You can select data within a table, and then click on the Add To MDQ button to save it for future reference. Once you have two or more sets of data from different datasets, you can look at the combined data table.

Schools search
The search function, accessible from the home page, is easy to use. Type in any search term and you will see listed every dataset that includes the search term. Enter “schools”, for example, and 11 results appear that you can click on to see the full dataset.

While there is plenty for novice users to get their teeth into here, there are also a few more advanced options, such as the ability to view datasets in Excel Pivot Table format, which provides a view of the data with Excel features enabled, such as sorting, data graphing and axes rotation.

Although I was impressed by the functionality of this beta site, it didn’t always work as I expected. Sometimes I’d click on a menu item and nothing at all would appear, not even an error message. Clicking on Browse Themes while looking at a dataset, for example, did nothing. At other times, error messages appeared seemingly at random. This may be a problem with the interface or simply because I was using the Safari web browser (Internet Explorer and Firefox are preferred).

The Save Query option did not seem to work at all, nor did anything happen when I clicked on Browse Queries, which is supposed to let users look at frequently requested queries or their own saved queries. It may be that this is because the site hasn’t been available long enough to generate a list of frequently requested queries.

The OECD’s collection of statistical data is rich and detailed. If you want to find the number of teachers and lecturers in Japan in 1999 (1,593,670), or the numbers of births in Mexico in 2001 (2,670,000), or the proportion of its GDP that Finland spent on health in 2005 (7.5%), it’s all here. Eventually, this will be an excellent resource. Until then, don’t be put off by the glitches. While it’s in beta, the service is free, so it’s worth putting it to good use now

www.sourceoecd.org/database/oecdstat

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