Sheeeit, as a researcher and student of development economics, all it took for me to realize they placed moreemphasis on the "economic forum" part than the "economic development" outlined in the mission statement was the obstacles between the earnest researcher and the data they compile. Most of these ngos do the due diligence in posture to match their stated goals (even if those goals are but cover). For instance, all data from the world bank is free and they have agents they send out to countries requesting help getting a statistics collecting agency off the ground and knowledeable of ideal forms of availability and measure (even if not obtainable for the country in question) so researchers can compare measures across countries for identical periods. Hell, Rand corp makes a great deal of what they publish freely available if you know how to navigate their website. As you move along the spectrum away from open data availability to some and the less to none you would pass respectively, the I.M.F. (about 50/50 freely available but that price tag for access to the rest....), then the B.I.S. (yes they actually have data freely available but either they state that some is not available or comes from other sources (subsidiaries e.g. world bank) and point to the sources) and finally at the end of the spectrum is the W.E.F. which only makes available its main dataset that they tout in publications but like deagle are rather obtuse in revealing the sources of underlying data or the transformations done to obtain the measures for their unique indicators (e.g. gdp data divided by population for a country give gdp per capita. thats a very simple example, but when dealing with indices any number of operations can be performed on data)
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