UN Data

by: Drazen Lucanin (drazen.lucanin at gmail.com)

The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) launched a new internet based data service for the global user community.

It brings UN statistical databases within easy reach of users through a single entry point. Users can now search and download a variety of statistical resources of the UN system.

Data

Collected over the past 60 years (UN founded in 1945). The data covers over 60 million data points.

Manual access

The data portal lists all the databases covering the following topics:

• education
• energy
• environment
• finance (source: IMF)
• food and agriculture
• gender
• health
• development indicators (source: UNICEF, World Bank, ...)
• labour
• tourism
• trade (UN Comtrade, only agregated values)

All of these topics open a unified data explorer where data can be previewed or opened to apply further filters (years, countries) as can be seen here.

Export formats:

• XML
• CSV
• SSV (semicolon separated values)
• PSV (pipe separated values)

API

There exists no official API. There seems to be an unofficial project to create the API, but it appears to be incomplete and deprecated.

Conclusion

It is good that various sources can be found unified here under a single access method, but again no API.