 I'm Salvatur Babonis, and today's lecture is using the CIA World Factbook. The CIA World Factbook is a great, quick, go-to guide to the countries of the world. It is up to date and reliable, but the statistics it reports are not always comparable across countries. It aggregates data from a huge number of sources into best guess answers to many commonly asked statistical questions about countries, and yes, it is published by that CIA, the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA World Factbook is best accessed online via its country-by-country menu listings, though it can be downloaded as a database as well. I'm going to go straight to the data, if my computer lets me, and there we go, the CIA World Factbook. The drop-down menu is very easy to use, the first thing you'll see is, please select a country to view. So I'm going to pick a country, let's try Brazil. We will find a plethora of information on Brazil, starting with a quick introduction. If you happen not to know what Brazil is or how it came to into existence, you'll find out that Brazil gained its independence in 1822, abolished slavery in 1888, essentially the one paragraph briefing on Brazil. Basic geographical information are included, where it is, what continent, land area, usual basic information about the country, and lots of data that are sourced from the World Bank's World Development Indicators, like number of acres of land under cultivation, freshwater resources, basic environmental information. Under People and Society, you'll get a mix of data that are hard data, like demographic data, age structure of the population sourced from the United States Census Bureau's International Database, but also information that is not necessarily as accurate or comparable across countries, for example, ethnic groups, white 47.7%, mulatto 43.1%, black 7.6%. These kind of data are sourced from individual sources, country by country, and may differ by country. As you can see, this is from a 2010 estimate, even though I'm accessing the World Factbook in 2016. Scrolling down to the government, you'll find basic data about the type of government Brazil has, its administrative divisions, chief of state, head of government, legislative executive, judicial branches, etc., main political parties. One of my favorite little quirks of the CA World Factbook is that it has recordings of the national anthems of all of the countries of the world, so if you'd like to hear Brazil's national anthem, just click play, and there you go, it is very upbeat. Alright, enough of Brazil's national anthem, well, maybe we should play it in the background as we continue the tour. The economy of Brazil, again, a brief paragraph overview of the economy, I'll stop that now. GDP by purchasing power parity, the CA World Factbook uses purchasing power parity primarily for GDP, and the per capita estimates are only in purchasing power parity series. The exchange rate based GDP is given here, and as you can see, purchasing power parity GDP of 3 trillion US dollars is much bigger than the GDP at official exchange rates of 1.8 trillion US dollars. If you wanted, you could back out from these calculations, GDP per capita at exchange rates just by taking the population figure reported above, and the GDP figure reported here, by GDP by population, you get GDP per capita, but you probably wouldn't be using the World Banks, I'm sorry, the CIA's World Factbook to get comparative GDP data, you would probably go to the World Banks World Development Indicator database, and again, lots of basic statistics about the country from all different economic sources. Energy communications, transportation, interestingly, these data are, as far as I know, only collected by the CIA, a number of airports with paved runways, a number of airports with unpaved runways, heliports, pipelines. Strategic data about country's infrastructure is only collected, as far as I know, together in one place by the CIA World Factbook. Very data and then disputes that the country is having with other countries. So there's Brazil. And if you go to any country in the world, you will find a similar run-through of data about the country, including, interestingly, the United States. I say interestingly because the CIA World Factbook is produced by the CIA for the use of American authorities, but they do provide the complete rundown and even an analysis of the United States and its problems and disputes, and of course, so data are available not just for the countries of the world, but also for many non-countries. For example, here is the territory of Akrotiri. In Cyprus, Akrotiri is a British naval base on the island of Cyprus. Its legal status is non-sovereign, but it is a territory of the world, and as a result, it gets an entry in the CIA World Factbook. It's not as extensive as the entries for full countries, but it is there, and you would find lots of obscure territories of the world listed in the CIA World Factbook. As you can see, there are several hundred entities listed, including the European Union at the very bottom. If we go back home in the CIA World Factbook, there are also some interesting additional resources available through the Factbook. If you go to the appendices, you will find lists of international organizations and lists of international agreements, which might be very useful. You can also find world maps, a database of flags of the world, which is potentially very interesting. My favorite little quirk, world leaders. The CIA maintains a database of leaders of foreign governments for the entire world. So to use Brazil again, we can go to Brazil, and we will find current, as of March 7th, 2016, the president, the vice president, all of the cabinet ministers of Brazil, head of the tourism office, everything about Brazil, Brazil's leaders in one little database. So if you're unsure who the minister of tourism in Brazil is, I can tell you that as of March 2016, it is Enrique Arvez. The CIA also produces standard maps of the world. The nice thing about CIA maps is that all United States government materials are copyright free, so you can use a CIA map without any fear that you're infringing on copyright. The map, so there does not seem to be a map of Brazil. So I will use Chile as an example, and you can get maps of Chile for use in your presentations, and these are copyright free maps that you can use without having to worry about going back, oops, going back home to the CIA fact book. Sorry, I got out of order here. There we go. Back to the CIA world fact book. As you can see, it's a massive resource of information about the world. The information, however, is not always comparable country to country because these sources may differ for different countries. So the world fact book should be used as a quick reference guide. If you need to know an obscure fact about a country like the number of miles of unpaved road in the country, go to the CIA world fact book, but if you're doing a systematic study of multiple countries, you should note that the sources underlying the data for each series may be different and not directly comparable. Takeaways. The CIA world fact book is a secondary source companion of best data for many primary sources. Second, the CIA world fact book is not a standardized compilation of primary data like the World Bank World Development Indicators is. And finally, the CIA world fact book is perfectly fine for illustrative purposes and for popular writing and journalistic writing, but it is not considered acceptable for definitive comparative research in the academic literature. Thanks for listening to this lecture. You can find out more about me at salvatrobobonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter, Cuttering Current Affairs.