Stata is a proprietary statistical software package widely adopted by economists. Some, like Stata, are proprietary and specialized for applications to econometric problems in the survey-data context others, like R, are open-source and follow more general coding standards so that they are more readily adaptable to tasks that are not well-defined in the econometric framework (such as Spatial Analysis). There is a broad range of software tools available for data analysis. Software tools are a crucial component of performing sampling and power calculations in development research.
