There are a few problems with getting international data electronically: It's spotty and not too many countries collect it themselves let alone put it on the Web. So, we have to rely on either international organizations or U.S. sources to collect our beloved numbers.
My attempt to put together information on some international data and sources of information resulted in Russian Sources for Reporters, part of the Hillman Project, at www.reporter.com/hillman/russian/ The pages are the seed of a plan to develop an international tip sheet and library of resources about Russia for English-speaking reporters. The second half of the project is to develop a collection of resources in the Russian language for Russian journalists writing about the United States. A third goal is to provide information about investigative and computer-assisted reporting in Russian. Since most international data cover all foreign countries, these pages are not limited to information about the new states of Eastern Europe. I couldn't possibly find and list all available information, but there are listservs and other human resources that you can use to dig further.
In the meantime, here are some useful sites: If you are on a fishing expedition, the good old Census Bureau is the first place to check. Its International Program Center (www.census.gov/ipc/www/) lists several databases covering foreign countries.
My favorite is the International Database (IDB), which covers a full bouquet of demographic and socio-economic data. It goes into such details as prevalence of contraceptives used in different countries and number of babies born to women of different age groups (look out for those teen-agers).
A word of warning: Be careful when talking to bureaucrats about international data: One well-meaning woman at the Department of Commerce tried to sell me IDB for $40 while the data was sitting nicely on the department's site.
The Census Foreign Trade Division (www.census.giv/foreign-trade/www/) is a good place to pick up statistics on international trade and U.S. trade surpluses and deficits with its top trading partners. Census also has data on immigration and numbers of foreign-born U.S. population.
The State department dishes out some really good reports (skip the travel advisories) (http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/dos_welcome.html, bottom of the page). One is on terrorism patterns in 1995, another one is on country background and international organizations reports, and another on U.S. Assistance to the New Independent States for FY 1996.
The CIA's World Fact Book is another good source. The CIA compiles this every year. It describes each country's political system, major players, land area, environmental laws, life expectancy and other crucial bits of information in flat text. The CIA has it in a database, but does not release it as such. Find it and other CIA publications at its homepage (http://www.odci.gov/cia).
Another great source for international data is the World Health Organization (www.who.ch or gopher://gopher.who.ch:70/11/). A list of the WHO's databases and links to them are at http://www.who.ch/whosis/whosis.htm#databases. Most of the data come in fixed-width text format. World Health Organization - Epidemic Info-Incidents is a great source of data on outbreaks of tuberculosis, measles, etc., in different countries. Data are in text format, tabular, fixed length, with some text mixed in.
UN Criminal Justice Country Profiles (gopher://uacsc2.albany.edu:70/11/newman/crjdoc) is another valuable source, especially with the crime and prison explosions that nations around the world are experiencing. It describes nations and their criminal justice and prison systems. See the State Department's reports on human rights practices in different countries, too.
Agricultural/Trade Databases from USDA (gopher://mann77.mannlib.cornell.edu:70/11/data-sets/international) is a good source for agro-economic information. Data comes from the USDA's Economic Research Service. You can download it, but the documentation also tells how to order data on a disk. Tables are readable in Excel. Russian commodity prices are there, as well as a bunch of European and African data.
Most of the pages containing data description (some systems refer to it as metadata) also list names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of researchers who collect the information. I didn't have much luck e-mailing them, though.
Natalya Shulyakovskaya can be reached at (800) 365-0820 ext. 8183, or send e-mail to natalya@pd.stinet.com