Data Is The New Oil - 11.02.2021 Update
Covid vaccinations, Excess mortality, Sustainable development, US mergers and acquisitions and Carbon emissions.
Covid vaccinations. The World Health Organisation published a list of vaccine doses for the 140 (mostly) developing countries that are part of its Covax initiative. The data can also be downloaded in csv format. A total of 320 million doses will be made available during the first half of 2021. Separately, the US Center for Disease Control published a time series of mask mandates at the county level, from April 2020 to January 2021. In total, 264 million Americans were required to wear a mask at the start of the year, equivalent to 80% of the population. I processed the data in a Jupyter Notebook.
Excess mortality. Researchers Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak created a dataset of country-level mortality in 2015–2021, using work conducted by Eurostat and the New York Times, and expanding it to new sources. It covers 79 countries. A paper explains the method (hat tip: Jeremy Singer-Vine).
Sustainable development. Yale University published environmental performance scores for 180 countries, using 32 indicators ranging from sanitation to drinking water, waste disposal, fishing conservation and CO2 emissions. Separately, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development released a new index measuring the productive capacity of 193 countries across different sectors (human capital, energy, transport, institutions, etc) between 2000-2018. This puts the focus on a country’s full economic capacity rather than output, which is better measured by GDP.
US mergers and acquisitions. The American Economic Liberties Project, a Washington think tank defending a reform of antitrust law, released a dataset documenting nearly 1,500 acquisitions of US companies between 2017 and 2021. 75 deals were above $10 billion in value.
Carbon emissions. The Global Carbon Project, an international research consortium, published early estimates of worldwide CO2 emissions for 2020, along with charts showing long-term trends by sector and country. A full, clean time series is also available, but stops in 2019.
Other Data Updates
Researchers published a dataset of extreme wind speeds for around 75 locations globally. A paper concludes that wind turbines tend to be more costly than they should be, as they are designed to withstand wind speeds that are too high.
WorldPop, an international research outfit, published a dataset of the world's population by age and sex, layered on top of a gridded map (with resolution of 100 metres by 100 metres).
The US Energy Information Administration released its 2021 energy outlook, comprising energy forecasts to 2050.
Two major operators of electricity chargers in France published a list of their locations. A consolidated dataset covering the whole French territory is available.
Cameroon published datasets of its entire power network and mining sites.
Worth a Read
Business risk and the emergence of climate analytics (link)
Day-to-day temperature variability reduces economic growth (link)
COVID-19-induced low power demand and market forces starkly reduce CO2 emissions (link)
A new attribute-linked residential property price dataset for England and Wales, 2011 to 2019 (link)
Shifting Streets COVID-19 Mobility Data: Findings from a global dataset (link)
Mapping Urban Land Use in India and Mexico using Remote Sensing and Machine Learning (link)
If you do know people who might enjoy this newsletter, I would really appreciate it if you would forward it on. Don't hesitate to contact me (oliv.lejeune@gmail.com) if you have any dataset suggestions or comments about this note. Thanks for reading.