In the big, fat dataset I’m using to study what affects the global flow of development aid, I’ve come across a problem which researchers must have dealt with a million times from scratch, and never published the results of how they got around it.
The data set has donor/recipient pairs for over a million promised amounts of development aid, along with a date and a reason for giving the aid.
Sounds simple, but the problem comes from data relating to countries which, according to my separate dataset of country boundaries (the wonderful CShapes) didn’t exist at the time the aid was promised.
For example, aid was given by the World Bank to Botswana in 1965 even though that country only achieved independence from Great Britain in 1966. My world boundaries dataset reflects this accurately giving a “start date” for Botswana of 1966. Before this date, the country was simple considered not to have existed and a map drawn of all the countries as of 1965 just has a gap where Botswana should be.
This is a pretty serious problem in the field of development aid, since many of the relevant countries are former colonies and aid was often given to those countries before they were independent from their colonial masters.
This problem must have been solved a million times before. But by whom?
Data-driven economics 