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 World Bank -- World Development Indicators (WDI)

The World Development Indicators (WDI) is a comprehensive collection of data for nearly every country in the world, with time series for many of the 575 indicators going back to 1960. The WDI is available online or as a CD-ROM from the World Bank.  Unfortunately the data base is not free, but the prices are accessible to many.  An annual subscription to  WDI online is $US100 but residents of most developing countries can buy at a discount of 75% with residents of some of the intermediate income countries receiving a discount of 35%.  The single user CD-ROM is available for $US275.00 with the same discount schedule applying. (You will need a credit card to purchase the products online.)

The online data base has the advantage of being update twice yearly -- in April and in September when much of the previous year's demographic data is added. For example, users in July 2004 would have access to data from 1960 to 2002. In September 2004 some of the data would be updated to give a series from 1960 to 2003.  The CD ROM for 2004 would include only data for 1960 to 2002.

The data base is set up on-line so that you can select data by country, by indicator and by year. It is possible to down load specific data for one country, for one indicator for one year or if you want, the whole database.  The main disadvantage of the online database is that downloading even moderately large amounts of data is slow, even on a high speed connection. Requests for large amounts of data may cause the data base to crash, so that ambitious downloads often have to be set up as a number of smaller downloads.  The database allows you to save the data either as an ASCII file or an Excel file.  However, while the Excel file will load in Excel, it is really a text file and any conversion from Excel to a data base such as Access requires reformatting of the fields from a string type to a number type (we find it more convenient to use the ASCII file if we plan to convert the data to Access). It would be useful if the Bank could also include a download in XML which could be loaded directly into many databases.

You can see a list of the countries covered at http://www.worldbank.org/data/countryclass/countryclass.html  . This is a useful link because you can down load the list in Excel format. The list includes a three character country code, the region, the income group and the level of indebtedness for each country.  This table can be linked to the data from the data base, however be careful, some of the country names in the list have accents, while the names in the data base do not. You will have to remove the accents if you want to link automatically. (Note the link to download the spreadsheet is right at the bottom of the page.)

You can see the list of indicators at http://publications.worldbank.org/WDI/indicators . At present this table cannot be downloaded, but a download similar to the countries list would be useful, particularly one with a code for each indicator and the indication of the data group etc.

You can test the interface with a sample data base which gives information for all of the countries for 54 indicators for 1997 to 2002 at http://devdata.worldbank.org/data-query/ . This will allow you to determine as well what the download speed of the data base is likely to be. It is also possible to link to data for the most recent year by country at http://www.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/databytopic.html .

If you are from a developing country you can determine the level of discount you are entitled to by going to http://publications.worldbank.org/discounts.

To purchase WDI online go to http://publications.worldbank.org/WDI/ and to purchase the CDROM go to http://publications.worldbank.org/ecommerce/catalog/product?item_id=2039638 . To purchase the WDI book go to http://publications.worldbank.org/ecommerce/catalog/product-detail?product_id=1017492&  (it is $US26 and also subject to country discounts.)