An important step in performing statistical analysis across many countries and many years is converting financial amounts to a single currency.
In the AidData web portal and AidData 2.0 research release, we use historical exchange rates to convert transactions to US Dollar and GDP deflators to bring all transactions to 2009. Our methodology is based on the work of the OECD CRS, which publishes deflators for DAC donors. We use the methodology that they apply to DAC donors in order to generate new deflators for non-DAC donors.
The whole deflator dataset is available here, but AidData has also made the deflators available through a simple web service:
AidData has made the deflators available through a simple web service:
https://data.itpir.wm.edu/deflate/
This service, hosted at the College of William and Mary’s Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations, makes AidData’s deflator methodology readily available to anyone. Users may use the drop-downs to select country of origin, currency, and year of the transaction(s), enter a single value or comma-separated values (eg. “435, 500.50, 32511.69”) as amount, and then click “Send” to deflate each value to USD-2009. For more tech-interested users, the API is described under “Documentation.”
We invite feedback from our users at info@aiddata.org. We hope to make this web service a valuable resource for years to come.