Too often the challenge is finding quality data to analyze. Data is especially important for the Rural Policy Learning Commons which is encouraging comparisons to inform and improve rural and remote communities and economies. This report is a directory of data bases assembled to help researchers, policy analysts, practitioners, businesses, and community members to make comparisons. Comparisons of one situation with another can help bench mark a situation and enhance knowledge and inform public policies. In some situations the comparison is based on a particular geographic unit with another, be it towns, regions, countries, or continents (Pennings et al., 1999). Comparisons can address many subjects, such as health, education and the economy. Comparative research is a broad term encompassing quantitative and qualitative analyses and helps discover similarities and contrasts that sharpen our powers of description and understanding (Mills, Van de Bunt and Bruijn, 2006; Collier, 1993). Comparisons are conducted across political, social, cultural, historical, and environmental regimes, and it is here where the differences in the data and results are nuanced and insights gained.

This report connects you to databases on such topics as health, environment, quality of life, economics, resilience and others which can be used in comparative analysis. The databases listed mainly covers comparisons in countries in North America and Europe, OECD countries and other parts of the world.

As students, this directory to databases is a quick resource to bring focus to your research and provide some assurance data exists. However, it is neither a comprehensive collection nor an exhaustive one; rather this director severs to illustrate the range of topics and data for comparisons while being accessible at no charge, (at the time of this printing). We hope others will be added to this directory over time and will be posted.