WDI
World Development Indicators and Other World Bank Data
Search and download data from over 40 databases hosted by the World Bank, including the World Development Indicators ('WDI'), International Debt Statistics, Doing Business, Human Capital Index, and Sub-national Poverty 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