International development: yesterday’s news?

by | Feb 7, 2011


Over at the World Bank blog, Adam Wagstaff’s been playing with Google Trends data from 2004 to today, to try to determine whether anyone’s actually paying any attention to flagship development reports like the World Development Report and Human Development Report.

He has some interesting findings on the relative popularity of different reports (the WDR only got googled 60% as often as the HDR from 2004 to now, for instance) – but what stands out most is how searches for international development per se have fallen. The graph below illustrates relatively frequency of searches, with 1 as the average over the full seven year period:

By contrast, searches for a control group – Wagstaff uses internet searches for a range of German cars – stayed pretty much level.

Author

  • Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.


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