WDI
World Development Indicators (World Bank)
Search, extract and format data from the World Bank's World Development Indicators.
The World Bank makes available a ton of great data from the World Development Indicators through its web API. The WDI package for R makes it easy to search and download data series from the WDI.
Installation
WDI is published on CRAN and so can be installed by simply typing this in the R console:
install.packages('WDI')
Searching for data
You can search for data by using keywords in WDIsearch. For instance, if you are looking for data on Gross Domestic Product:
WDIsearch('gdp')Which produces this:
indicator name [1,] "BG.GSR.NFSV.GD.ZS" "Trade in services (% of GDP)" [2,] "BM.KLT.DINV.GD.ZS" "Foreign direct investment, net outflows (% of GDP)" [3,] "BN.CAB.XOKA.GD.ZS" "Current account balance (% of GDP)" [4,] "BN.CUR.GDPM.ZS" "Current account balance excluding net official capital grants (% of GDP)" [5,] "BN.GSR.FCTY.CD.ZS" "Net income (% of GDP)" [6,] "BN.KLT.DINV.CD.ZS" "Foreign direct investment (% of GDP)" [7,] "BN.KLT.PRVT.GD.ZS" "Private capital flows, total (% of GDP)" [8,] "BN.TRF.CURR.CD.ZS" "Net current transfers (% of GDP)" [9,] "BNCABFUNDCD_" "Current Account Balance, %GDP" [10,] "BX.KLT.DINV.WD.GD.ZS" "Foreign direct investment, net inflows (% of GDP)" WDIsearch uses grep and ignores cases, so you can also use regular expressions. For instance, if you are looking for GDP per capita in constant dollars:
WDIsearch('gdp.*capita.*constant') indicator name [1,] "GDPPCKD" "GDP per Capita, constant US$, millions" [2,] "NY.GDP.PCAP.KD" "GDP per capita (constant 2000 US$)" [3,] "NY.GDP.PCAP.KN" "GDP per capita (constant LCU)" [4,] "NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD" "GDP per capita, PPP (constant 2005 international $)"Download and use the data
Download a series you like for the countries you like:
dat = WDI(indicator='NY.GDP.PCAP.KD', country=c('MX','CA','US'), start=1960, end=2012)Look at the data:
head(dat) iso2c country NY.GDP.PCAP.KD year1 CA Canada 9374.883 19602 CA Canada 9479.824 19613 CA Canada 9967.366 19624 CA Canada 10290.362 19635 CA Canada 10774.653 19646 CA Canada 11283.606 1965Plot the data:
library(ggplot2)ggplot(dat, aes(year, NY.GDP.PCAP.KD, color=country)) + geom_line() + xlab('Year') + ylab('GDP per capita')
Note: You can use country='all' to download data for all available countries. You can also feed a vector of indicator strings if you want to download multiple indicators at once.
Updating series list
To speed up search, WDI ships with a local list of all available WDI series as of 2012-06-18. This list will be updated semi-regularly, but you may still want to update it manually to get access to the very latest data series. To do so, use the cache function:
new_cache = WDIcache()WDIsearch('gdp', cache=new_cache)Bugs, suggestions, etc.
Thanks for using WDI! Please send all bug reports and suggestions through the github issue tracker or by email at [email protected]
News
Version 2.6.0 (2019-03-02)
startandendare NULL as default and download all available years.labelattribute to the return data.frame includes descriptive labels for eachWDIbulkfunction to download all of WDI- WDIcache and data trim whitespace from region names
Version 2.5.1 (2018-12-05)
- New version numbering scheme
- Updated country and indicator data
Version 2.5.0 (2018-04-09)
- Namespace issues (thanks to Jan Dietrich)
- Updated the list of available indicators
- Allow iso3c or iso2c as input for country argument
- Rolled-back indicator input clean up because too aggressive (Thanks to Geoff Wright)
- Rename columns automatically when using a named vector
Version 2.4.0
- Call RJSONIO::fromJSON explicitly to avoid conflict with JSON package (Thanks to Richard Cotton)
Version 2.3.0
- Change default start/end date per user request
Version 2.2.0
- Bug: country names were stripped of digits
Version 2.1.0
- Fixed various issues (thanks to Matthieu Stigler for bug reports and patches)
- Faster downloads when requesting multiple countries (leveraging the US;BR;CA API syntax)
Version 2.0.0
- Now uses JSON instead of XML (Faster, easier)
- WDIcache function now allows users to update the locally stored database of available WDI series
- Fixed doc examples
- Documentation now uses roxygen2
- Moved development to github
- Series and country info now in a single data list. utf-8 encoding fixed