World Development Indicators (WDI) is the
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Inte ...
’s premier compilation of international statistics on
global development. Drawing from officially recognized sources and including national, regional, and global estimates, the WDI provides access to approximately 1,600 indicators for 217 economies, with some time series extending back more than 50 years. The database helps users find information related to development, both current and historical.
World Development Indicators
retrieved December 6, 2018 The topics covered in the WDI range from poverty, health, and demographics to GDP, trade, and the environment.
The World Development Indicators website provides access to data as well as information about data coverage, curation, and methodologies, and allows users to discover what type of indicators are available, how they are collected, and how they can be visualized to analyze development trends.
Data sources
A share of the indicators in WDI come from World Bank Group
The World Bank Group (WBG) is a family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries. It is the largest and best-known development bank in the world and an observer at the United Nations Development Gr ...
surveys and data collection efforts, but the majority are based on data originally collected, compiled and published by other sources, including other international organizations such as UN specialized agencies (sometimes in cooperation with the World Bank), national statistical offices, organizations with a specific research or monitoring focus, the private sector, and academic studies.
Accessing the data
The World Bank’s Open Data site provides access to the WDI database free of charge to all users. Users can browse the data by Country, Indicators, Topics, and via th
Data Catalog
The WDI database can be accessed directly vi
DataBank
a query tool where users can select series, economies, and time periods, and do bulk downloads in Excel or CSV, or vi
API
In addition, data can be programmatically accessed using Stata, R, and Python modules.
WDI and the Sustainable Development Goals
World Development Indicators takes a comprehensive view of the world and currently includes many of th
official SDG indicators
as well as other data that are relevant to SDGs. For example, in addition to official indicators on the income/consumption growth of th
bottom 40 percent of the population
relative to th
average
as per SD
target 10.1
the WDI presents indicators like th
Gini index
or income shares by decile or quintile that are relevant for SDG goal 10 on inequality. SDG related indicators can also be explored in th
SDG dashboard
which uses WDI data.
References
External links
World Development IndicatorsWorld Bank Open DataDataBankThe Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2018Google - public data
Demographics indicators
World Bank
Year of introduction missing