MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Portal with 400 governance indicators on Latinamerica

www.iadb.org/datagob/index.html

The Inter-American Development Bank unveiled DataGob, an innovative portal that offers access to some 400 governance indicators, covering topics as varied as support for democracy, the cost of starting a business, wastefulness in government spending and police corruption in Latin America and the Caribbean and other developing regions of the world.

The indicators available at DataGob come from 30 different sources, including academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, private firms and multilateral agencies. They cover four major areas: democracy, markets, public sector management and rule of law, as well as a number of key socioeconomic indicators. DataGob can be useful for journalists, researchers, policy analysts, members of civil society groups and other persons interested in tracking and evaluating governance performance and the impact of reforms in their countries. Users can download data and construct comparative tables and graphs that can be printed or exported to commonly used software formats. The portal, which is available in Spanish and English, also has information on the methodology used to build the indicators, their reliability, conceptual validity and suitability for analyzing changes over time and differences across countries. DataGob was developed by the State, Governance and Civil Society Division of the IDB's Sustainable Development Department. The project was financed with a grant from the Markets and Governance for Poverty Reduction Trust Fund of the United Kingdom's Department for International Development. DataGob is part of Global Link, a gateway to other databases developed at the IDB, including Sociómetro, DataIntal, and EQXiS.