Tracking Turkmen Data

(updated from a 2007 Camel Spit article by Sheryl Abrahams, T-11)
The original article actually pulled some of the data from these sources in readable and informative tables. Unfortunately, your humble editor does not yet have the Blogger skills to translate that into a web posting. So, for now, readers will need to navigate to the pages to pull the data themselves. Happy tracking!

Gap Minder

Gap Minder is a great tool for tracking income (measured by inflation adjusted GDP) and health (measured by life expectancy at birth). This link takes you to data for Turkmenistan from 1955 to 2007.
World Bank
The web site of the World Bank is another useful source of information on economic, education and health-related indicators. Turkmenistan's page contains “Data and Statistics” with detailed data on health and demographics, education, economic development, and information technology access. Some indicators are available from 1985-2008, allowing
for trends to be tracked over time. Of particular note is the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) report. Though hotly debated, many development experts and funding organizations view MDG figures as the gold standard for country tracking, so it is interesting to see how Turkmenistan stands.

Links to downloadable copies of WB-issued written reports on Turkmenistan’s development and infrastructure are also available through this page.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
The UNDP is an excellent source for a number of human development indicators. Indicators are available for categories ranging from health and sanitation, to maternal and child health and survival, to women’s political participation, to energy and the environment, to technology diffusion and creation. Turkmenistan's fact sheet can be accessed here. Information available from UNDP includes indicators such as the human development index (and HDI rankings by country), GDP per capita, life expectancy at birth in both 1970-75 and 2000-05, demographic trends over the past 30 years, percent of population under the age of 15 and over the age of 65, public health and education expenditures as a percent of GDP, number of physicians per 100,000 people, and the female economic activity rate.


United Nations' Children's Fund (UNICEF)
UNICEF contains information on maternal and child health and key demographic indicators for a wide range of countries, including the under-5 mortality rate, the annual number of births, annual population growth rate, annual average rate of reduction in under-5 mortality, and nutritional indicators. Statistics on Turkmenistan are available here.