Financial systems and development

Technical notes
This twelfth edition of the World Development In- of GDP as a percentage of the United States' GDP.
dicators provides economic and social indicators The table on labor force has been dropped in this
for selected periods or years in a form suitable for year's edition because of the lack of new data. This
comparing economies and groups of economies. table will be reinserted when the 1990 round of
The main criterion of country classification is census results has been tabulated and collected by
GNP per capita, and this edition introduces new the International Labour Office (ILO).
country groupings. The main tables now include This makes a total of 32 main tables in which the
country data on 120 economies rather than the 129 statistics and measures have been chosen to give a
presented in the previous edition. Since only broad perspective on development.
sparse data are available for nonreporting non- Considerable effort has been made to standardmember
economies, these countries are not in- ize the data; nevertheless, statistical methods, covcluded
in the main tables. Summary measures for erage, practices, and definitions differ widely. In
them are shown in the main tables where avail- addition, the statistical systems in many developable,
and selected country data are presented in ing economies are still weak, and this affects the
Box A.2 in the technical notes. Box A.1, Basic indi- availability and reliability of the data. Moreover,
cators for economies with populations of less than intercountry and intertemporal comparisons al-
1 million, has been expanded to cover 55 econo- ways involve complex technical problems, which
mies. See the definitions and data notes at the be- cannot be fully and unequivocally resolved. The
ginning of the main report for details of country data are drawn from sources thought to be most
composition of the new groups and other related authoritative, but many of them are subject to coninformation.
siderable margins of error. Readers are urged to
The tables have been rearranged thematically, so take these limitations into account in interpreting
the table order has changed since the last edition. the indicators, particularly when making compari-
Note also that two tables have been modified: Ta- sons across economies.
ble 17, OECD imports of manufactured goods: ori- To facilitate international comparisons, national
gin and composition, and Table 30, Income distri- accounts constant price data series based on years
bution and ICP estimates of GDP. Table 17 other than 1980 have been partially rebased to the
provides data on South-North and North-North 1980 base. This is accomplished by rescaling, which
manufactured trade, and Table 30 now includes moves the year in which current and constant
International Comparison Program (ICP) estimates price versions of the same time series have the
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