Database of demographic indicators for countries of the world and regions of Russia: new functionality

Eugeny Soroko, Higher School of Economics, Moscow

The paper deals with 3 topics: 1) Overview of existing sources of information on population. It covers databases: Eurostat, Rosstat, UN World Population Prospects, World health organization, Statistics Sweden, Institut National d'Études Démographiques, Human Mortality Database, and many others. The sources are analyzed using more than twenty quality criteria – user interface, list of countries and indicators covered, age groups of population, data formats and precision, periodicity of updating, etc. 2) Description of the Database of demographic indicators for countries of the world and regions of Russia under development at the Institute of Demography of the National Research University Higher School of Economics: the principles of data collection from different sources, methods of formation of the data cubes, metadata for these arrays, the set of indicators currently covered, the reference files for coding, ... 3) New functionality of this database distinguishing it from another ones, examples of use for specific data queries and modes of work. They display several know-how options, including formation of query result from the several sources specified by the user, formation of data arrays of higher dimension for an indicator from the set of arrays of less dimension, checking the values of indicators and elimination of errors, recalculation of indicator’s values when different units of measurement are used in different sources. All the options are performed by the Database “on-the-fly”.