LibGuides: Model United Nations at GU-Q: Country Research

Featured Resources

Free Resources Available on the Internet
GUQ Subscription Resources

One of your first steps should be familiarizing yourself with social, political, and economic characteristics of the country you'll be representing.

CIA: The World Factbook
Political, geographic, economic, and sociological summaries organized by country.
Country Profiles (BBC)
Guides to history, politics and economic background of countries and territories, and background on key institutions. They also include audio and video clips from BBC archives.
Country Studies (Library of Congress)
Description and analysis of the historical setting and the social, economic, political, and national security systems and institutions of countries throughout the world from the US Library of Congress.
Member States | United Nations
U.S. Bilateral Relations Fact Sheets (U.S. Department of State)
Facts about the land, people, history, government, political conditions, economy, and foreign relations.
UN Web TV
The UN Web TV Channel is available 24 hours a day with selected live programming of United Nations meetings and events as well as with pre-recorded video features and documentaries on various global issues.

CountryWatch This link opens in a new window
Geographic, political, and economic information in narrative and statistical form on 192 individual countries. Provides GDP, growth, money, prices, unemployment, government, debt, trade, and balance of payments. Productivity data on five key sectors. Gives country rankings for trade, population, productivity, development and technology.
CQ Press Electronic Library This link opens in a new window
The online hub for all of the CQ Press products, including CQ Researcher, CQ Weekly,Sage Stats (formerly CQ Press State Stats), CQ Political Reference Suite / Online Editions.
CQ Press Political Reference Suite: Congress and the Nation (from 1945), Historic Documents Series (from 1972), Political Handbook of the World, Politics in America, Washington Information Directory, Supreme Court Yearbook (from 1989) and Vital Statistics on American Politics.

CQ Researcher: Publishes 12,000-word reports covering the most current and controversial issues of the day with complete summaries, insight into all sides of the issues, bibliographies and more on a weekly basis. Note: There is a limit of 10 concurrent users.

CQ Weekly: Provides political and legislative news, features, trends, forecasts and congressional voting records.
OECD iLibrary This link opens in a new window
The online publications portal of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Contains books, journals, newsletters, statistical periodicals, reference works, and interactive statistical data tables in over 25 database products published since 1998. Text can be searched by theme or country. Statistics can be searched by title and theme. Statistical databases allow users to build their own tables from the latest data, draw graphs and tables, and download to Excel or as .csv files.
OECD.Stat This link opens in a new window
Quarterly, monthly and annual time series measuring economic and social conditions in OECD member countries, the most highly industrialised in the world. Topics include general economic indicators, development and aid, agriculture, national accounts, labor market and social issues, foreign trade, and industry, science and technology.
Historical D&B Country Risk Reports This link opens in a new window
Ten (10) years of data and analysis of reports providing information on political risk, economic risk and commercial risk within a country. The 'DB' risk indicator provides a comparative, cross-border assessment of the risk of doing business in a country and encapsulates the risk that country-wide factors pose to the predictability of export payments and investment returns over a two year time horizon.
World Bank Data Catalog This link opens in a new window
The World Bank's Open Data initiative is intended to provide all users with access to World Bank data. These resources include databases, pre-formatted tables and reports.
The data catalog is a listing of available World Bank data sources. This listing will continue to be updated as additional data resources are added.
Each of the listings includes a description of the data source and a direct link to that source. Where possible, the databases are linked directly to a selection screen to allow users to select the countries, indicators, and years they would like to search. Those search results can be exported in different formats. Users can also choose to download the entire database directly from the catalog.
World Development Reports This link opens in a new window
This key World Bank publication offers recent statistics and narrative on topics relating to developing countries. 1978-present available online.
IMF eLibrary This link opens in a new window
eLibrary simplifies analysis and research with direct access to the IMF’s periodicals, books, working papers and studies, and data and statistical tools.
IMF Data This link opens in a new window
A portal to all IMF datasets, including International Financial Statistics (IFS), Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS), Government Finance Statistics (GFS), Balance of Payments Statistics (BOP, World and Regional Aggregates), Financial Access Survey (FAS), Coordinated Direct Investment Survey (CDIS), Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS) and International Reserves Template. You can search a combination of 308 countries, regions and NGOs. Contains 7325 economic concepts. Covers 1948-present.
To query data, follow these instructions.
Political Risk Yearbook This link opens in a new window
Each country analysis provides forecast summaries for the country, economic performance, social indicators, general business climate, and eighteen-month and five-year political and economic forecasts. Annual.