Free to use data
Multi-topic or Multi-regional data sites
United Nations data
UN general data page https://data.un.org data on everything, including data from most of the data sources mentioned below.
Keep this in mind: The copyright page of data.un.org https://data.un.org/Host.aspx?Content=UNdataUse says "All data and metadata provided on UNdata’s website are available free of charge and may be copied freely, duplicated and further distributed provided that UNdata is cited as the reference."
Unfortunately, most other UN sites say this "The United Nations grants permission to Users to visit the Site and to download and copy the information, documents and materials from the Site for the User’s personal, non-commercial use, without any right to resell or redistribute them or to compile or create derivative works therefrom..."
I use data.un.org for all data.
UN Social and Economic Commissions https://unstats.un.org/home/international_agencies/ lists various regional commissions and their data pages.
UN Population Programme, Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, statistics division https://www.unescap.org/our-work/statistics has basic demographic data for 57 Asia and Pacific countries, such as population, growth rate, infant mortality, urban population, gdp per capita. Data completeness varies considerably by country. Data are also presented by individual country (i.e., 57 individual data files)
Millenium Development Goals Indicators https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/stats.shtml can get a variety of data here
Data at Unicef https://data.unicef.org data on women, infant, child indicators of health.
Statistical yearbook https://unstats.un.org/UNSDWebsite/Publications/StatisticalYearbook/ most recent and access to previous yearbooks.
FAO stat https://www.fao.org/statistics/en/ has data on agriculture, food and nutrition, population, plants, animals, etc
Also see hunger and food insecurity in the world https://www.fao.org/measuring-hunger/en which has tables in pdf format.
FAO terms page https://www.fao.org/contact-us/terms/en/ says "Content on the FAO website is protected by copyright. To ensure wide dissemination of its information, FAO is committed to making its content freely available and encourages the use, reproduction and dissemination of the text, multimedia and data presented."
ILO labor statistics data https://ilostat.ilo.org includes "Yearly statistics of Employment, Unemployment, Hours of Work, Wages, Labour Cost, Consumer Price Indices, Occupational Injuries, Strikes and Lockouts" 1969 to current. Also, "Monthly statistics of Employment, Unemployment, Hours of Work, Wages, Consumer Price Indices. 1976 to current. Completeness of data for yearly and monthly varies by country, for example, some countries only have data for 1990 to present, some earlier.
The ILO rights page https://www.ilo.org/rights-and-permissions says "All ILO knowledge products published on or after 3 May 2023 by the ILO or on its behalf will be available for use or reuse without needing to request permission – as long as the ILO is cited as the source of material."
World Bank has a data page https://data.worldbank.org with lots of data.
Their terms of use page https://data.worldbank.org/summary-terms-of-use says "Unless indicated otherwise in the data or indicator metadata, you are free to copy, distribute, adapt, display or include the data in other products for commercial or noncommercial purposes at no cost under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, with the additional terms below." pointing to this page https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
A couple of WB data sets are:
Global Economic Monitor https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037798 The home page says "License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. This dataset is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0" and links to here https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/public-licenses?fragment=cc which says, in part, "The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license allows users to copy, modify and distribute data in any format for any purpose, including commercial use."
Statistical Performance Indicators (SPI) https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/statistical-performance-indicators The home page says "Data Use: Statistics have value only if they are used. So the first pillar is data use. A successful statistical system produces data that are used widely and frequently."
Business Ready https://www.worldbank.org/en/businessready "assesses the regulatory framework and public services directed at firms, and the efficiency with which regulatory framework and public services are combined in practice."
Monthly food price inflation estimates by country https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0060165
OECD has a variety of data sets. Their terms and conditions https://www.oecd.org/en/about/terms-conditions.html say "Except where additional restrictions apply as stated above, you can extract from, download, copy, adapt, print, distribute, share and embed Data for any purpose, even for commercial use." That is, you have to check each data set to see if there are further restrictions.
Some of their data pages are:
Data explorer page https://data-explorer.oecd.org
Indiators page https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators.html
Dashboards and tools https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards-and-tools.html
Other
African Development Bank https://www.afdb.org/en has a statistics page. Click on "knowledge" and then statistics, which goes to here https://www.afdb.org/en/knowledge/statistics . Data on human development indicators, macroeconomic indicators and other economic indicators. There are tables showing cross country comparisons and individual country tables.
Asian Development Bank data page https://www.adb.org/what-we-do/data Has data on a number of topics, such as population, poverty, environment. See for example the key indicators page https://www.adb.org/what-we-do/data/key-indicators which has population, health, education, employment, over time.
The Economic Commission for Latin America https://www.cepal.org/es has statistical yearbooks with data on economics, social welfare, social conditions. For example, for English speakers, from the home page, click on English and then click on Work areas, and then Statistics, which goes here https://www.cepal.org/en/work-areas/statistics
Eurostat https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat has all sorts of stuff.
European Union data page https://data.europa.eu/en
European Commission https://commission.europa.eu/resources/statistics_en
The Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries (SESRTCIC), at https://www.sesric.org provides a variety of data about its member states. These fifty-seven states include Afghanistan, Bahrain, Chad, Egypt, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Qatar, Syria, Turkey and Uzbekistan, amongst others.
Indices of Social Development (ISD) https://isd.iss.nl "brings together 275 indicators, synthesising them into a usable set of measures to track how different societies perform along six dimensions of social development. From the International Institute of Social Studies
The Legatum Prosperity index https://index.prosperity.com kind of a general overall index, including economic and other quality of life factors.
Demographic data
The sites listed here are mainly demography sites, but have other data as well.
UN data, world population prospects. Go to UN data, https://data.un.org/Default.aspx then click on Datamarts, and then scroll down to "World Population Prospects" near the botton.
WHO Global Health Observatory (GHO) data https://www.who.int/data/gho The WHO copyright page says "The CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence allows users to freely copy, reproduce, reprint, distribute, translate and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, provided WHO is acknowledged as the source"
Economic data
The sites listed here are sites mainly about economic data, but have other data as well.
Groningen Growth and Development Centre https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/ Has Penn World Tables with income, productivity, from 1950 to current. Maddison Historical Statistics, with population, GDP. And more data. Their data page says "The GGDC provides unique information on comparative trends in the world economy in the form of easily accessible datasets, along with comprehensive documentation. These data are made publicly available" Just as an fyi, I used Maddison's data in my dissertation.
IMF has a data page https://www.imf.org/en/data lots of data.
UNCTAD World Investment Report https://unctad.org/topic/investment/world-investment-report includes data sets such as Inward FDI Stock as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product, and many others.
World Income Inequality Database https://www.wider.unu.edu/project/world-income-inequality-database "The UNU-WIDER World Income Inequality Database (WIID) collects and stores information on income inequality for developed, developing, and transition countries." From the United Nations University. The last update is from 2025.
The Standardized World Income Inequality Database https://fsolt.org/swiid/ from Frederick Solt, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa. https://politicalscience.uiowa.edu/people/faculty He says this is a database using the WIID, plus a bunch of other data, to "maximize the comparability of income inequality data while maintaining the widest possible coverage across countries and over time."
The World Inequality Database (WID.world) https://wid.world aims to provide open and convenient access to the most extensive available database on the historical evolution of the world distribution of income and wealth, both within countries and between countries.
UBS has this Global Wealth Report and Data https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealthmanagement/insights/global-wealth-report.html Reports are in pdf
Reviewing and updating this page. As of 12/20/2025, got to here.
Political data
Some research indicates that change is related to governments. Specifically, successful change requires the presence of stable and flexible political systems. I'm not sure there is data on this exact topic, so these sites have data that might be indicators of state stability or flexibility. A number of these sites focus on political or economic freedom.
Bertelsmann Transformation Index http://www.bti-project.org/en/home/ another political index of some sort
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) http://www.cses.org/ "collaborative program of cross-national research among election studies conducted in over fifty consolidated and emerging democracies. The goals of this unique program of research are threefold: illuminate how electoral institutions constrain the beliefs and behaviors of citizens to condition the nature and quality of democratic choice as expressed through popular elections; understand the nature of political and social cleavages and alignments; and shed light on how citizens, living under diverse political arrangements, evaluate democratic institutions and processes." They can look at "satisfaction with the performance of democracy: how do citizens respond to varying institutional forms of democracy?"
Fragile State Index http://fsi.fundforpeace.org/ Indicators of risk
Freedom house http://www.freedomhouse.org/ especially see their country ratings page, which is "an annual assessment of state state of freedom by assigning each country and territory the status of "Free," "Partly Free," or "Not Free" by averaging their political rights and civil liberties ratings. This data is available as html, excel and pdf, for 1972/73 to the current year.
Global Integrity http://www.globalintegrity.org/ Reports. "The Report evaluates both anti-corruption legal frameworks and the practical implementation and enforcement of those frameworks, and takes a close look at whether citizen can effectively access and use anti-corruption safeguards."
The Polyarchy Scale http://www3.nd.edu/~mcoppedg/crd/datacrd.htm The Polyarchy and Contestation Scales for 1985 and 2000, and Contestation and Inclusiveness, 1950-2000, two measures of democracy.
The Center for Systemic Peace http://www.systemicpeace.org/ has a bunch of data sets including the Polity IV (governance), armed conflict, terrorists, and more. Look at other data on the Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM) at http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute https://www.sipri.org/databases has data on a number of topics, including military expenditure and a few more.
Transparency International corruption perception index http://www.transparency.org/ See "What we do" then Publications. Versions from 2008 and before are available at Internet Center for Corruption Research http://www.icgg.org/ The TI site also has a global corruption barometer and a bribe payers survey.
World Audit http://www.worldaudit.org/ lists data on democracy, political rights, civil liberties, corruption. The civil liberties and political rights are Freedom House data (described above).
World bank governance indicators http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home data on corruption and other governance indicators. This data set is also listed at the World Bank Research Data Sets described above. The variables in this data set are: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption.
Women in Parliments http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm from the InterParlimentary Union. Data on number and percent of women in parliments, by region and by country. Looks like data from 1998 through current.
Vision of Humanity http://www.visionofhumanity.org/ from the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a non profit think tank. http://economicsandpeace.org/ . The Vision of Humanity has a couple of indexes, including the Global Peace Index, Terrorism Index, and peace indexes for a couple of countries.
Global Terrorism Database http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/ an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world since 1970
Department of Peace and Conflict Research http://www.pcr.uu.se/ houses a whole bunch of data at their data page http://www.pcr.uu.se/data/ such as the Data on Armed Conflict, and a lot of other conflict type data.
Conflict and Security Indices: A Summary of Open-Source Data http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA494834 this 2008 paper by Pavlovic, Nada J. ; Blackler, Kristen ; Mandel, David R. reviews a bunch of measures of conflict and security indicators.
Correlates of War http://www.correlatesofwar.org/ includes data on war, but also religion and some other stuff
Country Indicators for Foreign Policy (CIFP) http://www4.carleton.ca/cifp/ see the country ranking tables, and the indicator descriptions for explanations. Many variables are ranked from 1996 to 2000, for many countries. Variables include armed conflict, gov stability, militarization, demographics, and others.
The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) https://www.prio.org/Data/ have a number of data sets on various topics. Of particular interest is that they offer data used in publications, that people can download and duplicate the published research. PRIO also has research available.
Social data
Unesco statistics about education http://data.uis.unesco.org/ also science, technology, communication
WORLD DATABASE OF HAPPINESS http://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/ This is "an ongoing register of scientific research on subjective appreciation of life. It brings together findings that are scattered throughout many studies and provides a basis for meta-analytical studies." The data are available as an spss file from the author. Also, click on Finding Reports and then Rank reports of Happiness in Nations. This leads to a table showing a list of countries and their average happiness. You can also go to Happiness in Nations, then Search Findings by Item Type and some of the questions have data for a large number of countries.
Barro-Lee education data set http://www.barrolee.com/data/dataexp.htm and http://databank.worldbank.org/Data/Views/VariableSelection/SelectVariables.aspx?source=Education%20Statistics#
UN Refugee agency http://www.unhcr.ch/ has data on refugees, in pdf format, http://www.unhcr.ch/fr/services/chiffres-et-statistiques.html
Ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/romain.wacziarg/papersum.html fractionalization data available here, as well as a paper, by Romain Wacziarg and others. Fractionalization is presented for three factors: ethnic, linguistic and region. Data for each country varies from 1983 (e.g. Angola) to 1998 (e.g., Austria), but seems only for one year for each country. Overall, there is high correlation between ethnicity and language (0.63) but low correlation between language and religion (0.24) and between religion and ethnicity (0.14). That is, ethnicity and language seem tied together, but religion seems independent. The paper is from 2003.
Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization (ELF) Indices for 1961 and 1985 http://weber.ucsd.edu/~proeder/data.htm Dr. Roeder writes that "A common interpretation of the index is that it is the probability that two individuals chosen at random from the population (country) will be from different ethnic groups." There is high correlation between Roeder's ELF and Wacziarg et al's ethnic (0.79) and language (0.75) fractionalization, but low between ELF and religious (0.33) fractionalization.
Social Fractionalization, Political Instability, and the Size of Government http://www.imf.org/External/Pubs/FT/staffp/2001/03/annett.htm includes a data set showing fractionalization of a country's population (along ethnolinguistic and religious dimensions) . The ratings are listed here http://humandevelopment.bu.edu/dev_indicators/show_info.cfm?index_id=234&data_type=1 paper is from 2002
Reporters Without Borders http://en.rsf.org/ has worldwide press freedom index 2002 to current.
Quality of Life http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf Quality of life data for 2005, includes data. The data are also in this file http://gsociology.icaap.org/data/PD_useful.xls available on my data sets page.
Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index, 2015 http://reports.weforum.org/travel-and-tourism-competitiveness-report-2015/ from World Economic Forum
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life http://www.pewforum.org/ has a lot of data on religion. Their data are free to use for research, academic, but with conditions.
The Fraser Institute has this project "Towards a Worldwide Index of Human Freedom" https://www.fraserinstitute.org/research/towards-a-worldwide-index-of-human-freedom from January 2013, which measures economic and also personal freedom, including religion. A table showing data is in chapter 3
Crime data
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime http://www.unodc.org/ has a section on data and analysis, including crime statistics http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/statistics/crime.html
International Centre for Prison Studies http://www.prisonstudies.org/ has world prison briefs where you can get data on prison totals, rates, and other related data. This is from Institute for Criminal Policy Research, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London
The European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics http://wp.unil.ch/europeansourcebook/ Crime and criminal justice data. This is a wordpress site of The University of Lausanne.
National and international well being and progress
OECD's Measuring the Progress of Societies http://www.wikiprogress.org/ OECD project.
Measuring national well-being http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/user-guidance/well-being/index.html Currently archived. Last updated December 2015.
Gross National Happiness http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/ Centre for Bhutan Studies
Canadian Index of Wellbeing https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/
Social Progress Imperitave http://www.socialprogressimperative.org/ "The Social Progress Index is an aggregate index of social and environmental indicators that capture three dimensions of social progress: Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity. " One way to get to the report is to go to the faq, then click on "What does the 2016 Global Social Progress Index tell us?"
I'm not exactly sure who this organization is, other than they say it's funded by philanthropies and corporations. There is no clear listing of what this organization is or who they are. There is a list of officers on their 990 form, but no information about who they are.
World Happiness Report http://worldhappiness.report/ can download data. The website doesn't say who organized/produced this, except at the bottom of a couple of pages it says "The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) was commissioned by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2012 to mobilize scientific and technical expertise from academia, civil society, and the private sector to support practical problem solving for sustainable development at local, national, and global scales." However, Columbia's Earth Institute seems to be involved: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2016/03/16/world-happiness-report-2016-launched/
How's Life? 2015, Measuring Well-being http://www.oecd.org/std/how-s-life-23089679.htm How’s Life? describes the essential ingredients that shape people’s well-being in OECD and partner countries.
Misc data
Democide http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ murder by governments. I'm very sorry to say the web site says this "Professor Rummel passed away on March 2, 2014. His "Powerkills" website will be maintained by the University of Hawaii Political Science Department."
Axel Dreher has an index of globalization, and another on corruption http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/
The CSGR Globalisation Index http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/researchcentres/csgr/index "measures the economic, social and political dimensions of globalisation for countries on an annual basis over the period 1982 to 2004, and combines these into an overall globalisation index, or score."
Internet World Stats, http://www.internetworldstats.com/ An International website featuring worldwide up to date Internet Usage Statistics and Population Data for over 233 countries and world regions. Their world table http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm shows world data, and they have more detailed data by region.
International Telecommunications Union has a statistics page http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx This is a UN organization.
Cline Center for Democracy http://www.clinecenter.illinois.edu/data/ has a number of data sets that are publicly available.
Societal Infrastructure and Development (SID) Datasets - religious composition, educational attainment, etc.
The Social Political and Economic Event Database Project Datasets - (civil unrest, property rights, electoral processes, etc.
Global Innovation Index http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/ something about the national economy that allows for innovative activities. The about page (actually the contact us page) says this is "co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO, an agency of the United Nations)"
International Energy Agency statistics http://www.iea.org/statistics/ Some of their publications are free, like the Key World Energy Statistics http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/key-world-energy-statistics.html In pdf format, but with some work, you can get it into tables.
Relief Web http://reliefweb.int/countries list of disasters, crises
Sites that list other data sites
UN links to other official data sites http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/inter-natlinks/sd_natstat.htm
Official Statistics of the world http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz/
Key Starting Points for Statistics http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stats.htm Data on all sorts of topics. Some are free but many are not. But this lists so many varies sources its worth looking at.
Guide to freely available international data resources http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/get-data/other-providers/international.aspx Their website says their home office is at the University of Essex.
This Open Directory page http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Government/Multilateral/Regional/ also lists various regional organizations, many of which have data.
Data Portal Tools
CKAN http://ckan.org/ an open-source data portal platform. The website says "CKAN is a powerful data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data. CKAN is aimed at data publishers (national and regional governments, companies and organizations) wanting to make their data open and available."
Open Data Catalogs http://census.okfn.org/ from the Open Knowledge Foundation. "The open data census assesses the state of open data around the world. This site hosts the census and presents the results along with other key facts about the state of open data and especially open government data around the world."
Data repositories
Data Hub http://datahub.io/ The site says "Give your data a home"
Open Data info
European Union's Open data: An engine for innovation, growth and transparent governance http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2011:0882:FIN:EN:PDF
Misc
NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data https://nsd.no NSD is a national archive and center for research data.