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Socio-Economic Global Data 
Medard Gabel 
World Game Institute 
USA 
World Game Institute 
The World Game Institute is a 23 year old not-for-profit research and education organization based in 
Philadelphia, PA, USA. It has been collecting socio-economic and environmental global data for 
over 20 years. One of its products, Global Data Manager has been on the market for ten years, 
making this data available to researchers. A new version, Global Data Manager 3.0, will be coming 
out soon with a much larger data set than anything currently available. Over 5000 separate indicators, 
many in time series from 1950 and 1960 through 2000 will be available. 
Socio-economic data 
The good news is that, just as with global ecosystems data, there is a vast wealth of global socio- 
economic data. The bad news is that, just as with ecosystems data, there are many problems with 
this data. 
The problems with the current socio-economic data that is available include: 
1. Different data sets are often incompatible with other data sets; 
2. Data is incomplete - both in coverage of areas and in years; that is, not all data sets cover all 
the countries of the world, and not all data sets cover the same years; 
. Data is inconsistent - that is, data is often in different units and can have different definitions; 
4. Data can be contradictory - one data source will have data that is contradictory to another 
sources data due to different collection schedules or techniques; 
. Data can be erroneous - some error creeps in all data; socio-economic data is no exception; 
6. Data is non-existent - there are many important socio-economic phenomena for which there is 
no data collection. 
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One of the missions of the World Game Institute is to remedy the above problems with socio- 
economic data through a wide variety of statistical and data integration processes. The Institute 
integrates data that has been rendered incompatible because of differing software platforms. It also 
makes data consistent, sorts out contradictions and errors, and searches for the highly specialized data 
sources that can fill the gaps in socio-economic global data coverage. In essence, the Institute seeks 
to check, clean, verify and validate global socio-economic data, and to make accessible to ever larger 
groups of researchers and educators comprehensive, consistent, accurate global and country-level 
data in a single easy to use yet powerful format.