The World Bank works closely with the international statistical community including the agencies of the United Nations (UN), the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the regional development banks, and donors by:
- Participating in the UN Statistical Commission and other statistical forums to develop appropriate frameworks, guidance and standards of good practice for statistics
- Building consensus and defining internationally agreed indicators, such as the indicators for the Millennium Development Goals
- Establishing data exchange processes and methods
- Assembling, analyzing and disseminating data online and in print
In addition to compiling international data sets, which are generally based on data generated by national statistical systems, the World Bank supports a number of programs to collect transnational data. These are data that can only be collected by a globally coordinated program. They include: