World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick announced in April of this year that along with the launch of open access to the World Development Indicators (WDI) 2010, with nearly 1000 indicators, the initiative also opens up the Global Development Finance (GDF), Africa Development Indicators (ADI), Global Economic Monitor (GEM), and indicators from the Doing Business report.

Better yet, all of the data is now centralized at http://data.worldbank.org and this is good news for empirical research related to international law and development, as well as many other avenues of economic and social inquiry on a global scale.

According to Zoellick, “Statistics tell the story of people in developing and emerging countries and can play an important part in helping to overcome poverty. They are now easily accessible on the Web for all users, and can be used to create new apps for development. ”