[wdmmg-discuss] bringing together spending of all UN countries

Sat Feb 5 15:19:40 UTC 2011

Hello,

I wrote a blog post for wdmmg recently and I got an excellent comment:

"I'm more interested in this comparisons between UN countries that you 
mention, in the big categories: education, defence, social security, 
culture. http://www.nationmaster.com/ is the only source I know trying to 
visualize data instead of spreadsheets downloads, but the data is old. Can 
you recommend any other?"

This made me wonder:

  - I believe, but I don't know for sure, that 192 United Nations member
    states each year classifies their spending under the COFOG system
  - we know that the countries mostly publish their spending under these
    categories on their government websites

but does the UN do anything with all this data? Do they display it on the 
UN stats website, or do they analyse it and publish a report?

Does anyone know of a place where all the spending data from all UN 
countries is brought together and even better if any visualisation work 
has been done in this area?

I've looked into the UN website and it looks like the nationmaster website 
gets its data from the national accounts at 
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/cList.asp, but I can't find anywhere on 
the UN website that publishes each country's spending under COFOG 
classification.

Many thanks,

Lisa