September 2009: ESDS International released the United Nation’s Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN Comtrade) on 15th September 2009. This extensive database contains over 1.1 billion records and is considered to be the most comprehensive trade database available. Topics covered by this vast commodities database include food and live animals, beverages and tobacco, crude materials, mineral fuels, chemicals, animal and vegetable oils, machinery and transport equipment. It contains time series data from over 140 reporter countries with series starting from 1962. Unlike the other macro datasets in the ESDS International portfolio, access to UN Comtrade is via the UN’s own interface rather than Beyond 20/20. ESDS International provide a dataset user guide and a software guide for the database. The UN Comtrade database can be accessed via federated access management authentication at http://comtrade.mimas.ac.uk/db.

ESDS International launched access to the World Bank's Africa Development Indicators (ADI) on 19th May 2009. The ADI provide annual time series data from 1960 onwards for 53 African countries and 5 regional country groups and contain over 1,400 indicators. This database is now available online here through the delivery software Beyond 20/20 Web Data Server. A dataset user guide providing details on the extensive topics covered by the ADI is available as well as a software guide for accessing the database using Beyond 20/20.

For the latest status of data negotiations, data processing work and release dates for each of the datasets within the ESDS International data portfolio, please see the data availability section.

Information on when each dataset was last updated can be found under the Data updates section.

User requests for data can be made in the Data Wishes section.

Also see ESDS International new data releases to search the Data Catalogue for new releases of both micro (survey) data and the macro databanks.