News Archive

Area Database 1.6.0. Data added for Kenya 2014, Cambodia 2014, Peru 2012, Cuba 2011, Suriname 2011, Jamaica 2006.

Area Database 1.5.0. Data added for Afghanistan 2011, Turkmenistan 2006, Lao 2012, Sudan 2010, Tunisia 2011, Costa Rica 2011, Panama 2013, Argentina 2011.

Area Database 1.4.0. Child Mortality Rates have been added for 624 regions in 67 LMICs.

Area Database 1.3.0. Sub-national Indicators for Demographic Window and Population Size have been added.

Area Database 1.2.0. Sub-national indicators for major regions of China in 2002 and 2011 have been added, including wealth, poverty, and education.

This month the first full version of the GDL Area Database was launched. It contains freely downloadable indicators at national and sub-national level for low and middle income countries (LMICs). The indicators are aggregated from representative household surveys. Version 1.1.0 contains 61 indicators for urban and rural areas and for 756 sub-national regions within 83 countries. In the near future the database will regularly be extended with new indicators and with data for additional countries and years.

A World Education blog has come out in which the importance of comparable wealth measures like IWI is highlighted. You find it here .

A paper using the International Wealth Index to study health inequalities in 52 countries has been published in Plos One. You find it here .

We have prepared data files to add IWI to a large number of DHS and MICS surveys. These files contain the value of IWI for all households plus the DHS/MICS household IDs. On the basis of the Ids, IWI can be connected to the households in the original datasets. Using these files it is not necessary any more to do the tedious coding work. Given that the files contain information at the household level, we can only make them available to users after having obtained permission of DHS/MICS for this. Please contact us if you are interested in this option.

An updated version of the SPSS files for computing IWI is available at the IWI download page. In the new 1.1 version, the construction of the utensil variables has been improved. In this version, households owning a more expensive utensil are automatically assumed to have also a cheap utensil and household owning a car are assumed to have also an expensive utensil. In the first version of the files, this was not the case.