The World Bank web site offers a helpful Statistical Manual, which provides definitions and methodological discussions of statistics collected by the World Bank and other institutions concerned with comparative international data.
Their abstract:
“The Statistical Manual brings together definitions of and explanations of the relationships between concepts used in economic statistics such as the balance of payments, the national accounts, and the government finance statistics. The manual furthermore discusses specific measures and methodologies used by the World Bank, like domestic savings and the Atlas methodology, for which there are no references in other international guidelines and manuals. The manual was written with the intention of covering those macro statistical aggregates most used by Bank economists, and in particular those working on the Live Database (LDB).”
Good for: Great for prompting yourself on issues that need to be considered when building your own dataset or when just using data from the World Development Indicators (WDI).