I’ve managed to get some data onto my PostGIS database, and have got my first visualisation result.
Since the aid dataset is large (c. 1,000,000, source: aiddata.org, the dataset is called ‘aid data 2 short’) I’ve summed over donors and within years, to leave me with a total aid received (or rather, promised, since the dataset has amounts pledged, not amounts donated) per recipient country per year. This set is a far more manageable size.
Having added population data from the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs (World Population Prospects, the 2010 revision) I’m able to draw a choropleth map of the world with the colour of a country representing amount of aid committed to that country in a the current year (the example uses 2000 as a randomly chosen benchmark). It’s work which is very similar to this.
Nice, isn’t it?
Data-driven economics 