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Introducing the online guide to the World Development Indicators: A new way to discover data on development

World Bank Data Team's picture
Also available in: العربية | Español | 中文 | Français

The World Development Indicators (WDI) is the World Bank’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 almost 1,600 indicators for 217 economies, with some time series extending back more than 50 years. The database helps users—analysts, policymakers, academics, and all those curious about the state of the world—to find information related to all aspects of development, both current and historical.

An annual World Development Indicators report was available in print or PDF format until last year. This year, we introduce the World Development Indicators website: a new discovery tool and storytelling platform for our data which takes users behind the scenes with information about data coverage, curation, and methodologies. The goal is to provide a useful, easily accessible guide to the database and make it easy for users to discover what type of indicators are available, how they’re collected, and how they can be visualized to analyze development trends.

So, what can you do on the new World Development Indicators website?

1. Explore available indicators by theme

The indicators in the WDI are organized according to six thematic areas: Poverty and Inequality, People, Environment, Economy, States and Markets, and Global Links. Each thematic page provides an overview of the type of data available, a list of featured indicators, and information about widely used methodologies and current data challenges.

True Demand for Data

Michael M. Lokshin's picture
Headquarters of the United Nations
Photo: Yutaka Nagata (CC BY 2.0)

A snow storm was barreling toward New York City and the roster of attendees at the UN Statistical Committee meeting—myself included—fully expected that all flights would be canceled. Fifty statisticians made the same calculation—to find the closest bar. I headed to the Vienna Café in the UN headquarters building, a place which affords one the rarified opportunity to socialize with high-level government officials from around the world. On my way in, I recognized the Director-General of a statistics office from an African country and we spoke. I mentioned several statistical programs that donors were planning to finance in his country. He expressed enthusiasm about these projects but voiced an increasingly familiar note of concern about long term sustainability of his agency in general. He fretted that his entire statistical office would collapse without donor support. He admitted that most of the demand for data was coming from the donors themselves, as indicators for their own reporting and planning; the country’s own government had much less interest in data or statistics.

Applications open for third round of funding for collaborative data innovation projects

World Bank Data Team's picture
Photo Credit: The Crowd and The Cloud


The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the World Bank Development Data Group are pleased to announce that applications are now open for a third round of support for innovative collaborations for data production, dissemination, and use. This follows two previous rounds of funding awarded in 2017 and earlier in 2018.

This initiative is supported by the World Bank’s Trust Fund for Statistical Capacity Building (TFSCB) with financing from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), the Government of Korea and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Ireland.

Scaling local data and synergies with official statistics

The themes for this year’s call for proposals are scaling local data for impact, which aims to target innovations that have an established proof of concept which benefits local decision-making, and fostering synergies between the communities of non-official data and official statistics, which looks for collaborations that take advantage of the relative strengths and responsibilities of official (i.e. governmental) and non-official (e.g.,private sector, civil society, social enterprises and academia) actors in the data ecosystem.

The 2018 Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals: an all-new visual guide to data and development

World Bank Data Team's picture
Also available in: Español | العربية | Français
Download PDF (30Mb) / View Online

“The World Bank is one of the world’s largest producers of development data and research. But our responsibility does not stop with making these global public goods available; we need to make them understandable to a general audience.

When both the public and policy makers share an evidence-based view of the world, real advances in social and economic development, such as achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), become possible.” - Shanta Devarajan

We’re pleased to release the 2018 Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals. With over 180 maps and charts, the new publication shows the progress societies are making towards the 17 SDGs.

It’s filled with annotated data visualizations, which can be reproducibly built from source code and data. You can view the SDG Atlas online, download the PDF publication (30Mb), and access the data and source code behind the figures.

This Atlas would not be possible without the efforts of statisticians and data scientists working in national and international agencies around the world. It is produced in collaboration with the professionals across the World Bank’s data and research groups, and our sectoral global practices.
 

Trends and analysis for the 17 SDGs

Artificial intelligence for smart cities: insights from Ho Chi Minh City’s spatial development

Ran Goldblatt's picture
Zoning by Land Parcel (Source: https://thongtinquyhoach.hochiminhcity.gov.vn)

It’s amazing to see what technology can do these days! Satellites provide daily images of almost every location on earth, and computers can be trained to process massive amounts of data generated from them to produce insightful analysis/information. This is just one of the demonstrations of artificial intelligence (AI). AI can go beyond just reading images captured from space, it can help improve lives overall.

For urban governance, machine learning and AI are increasingly used to provide near real-time analysis of how cities change in practice – for example, through the conversion of green areas into built-up structures. By teaching computers what to look for in satellite images, rapidly expanding sources of satellite data (public and commercial), together with machine learning algorithms, can be leveraged to quickly reveal how actual city development aligns with planning and zoning or which communities are most prone to flooding. This provides insights beyond the basic satellite snapshots and time-lapse visualizations that can now be readily generated for any areas of interest.

But the barriers to applying these technologies can still seem daunting for many cities around the world. It’s not always clear how exactly to analyze this massive amount of satellite data, nor how to get access to it.

Achieving good budgetary governance: What have we learned from PEFA in the past decade?

Lewis Hawke's picture

The national budget is the primary document through which governments present their plans and the resources, including taxes, they intend to collect to fund them.

Many countries present both national and sectoral strategies that identify policy priorities to be funded through the budget. For example, the health sector could include details of policies to provide vaccination on a range of diseases and details of citizens' access to specific healthcare services.

A government's inability to implement the national budget as planned could be a sign of lack of capacity to forecast revenues and expenditures adequately or an inability to properly cost financial impact of government policies, or quite commonly a mixture of all of these issues.

However, in many cases the reason why governments are unable to execute budgets as planned could be, at least partially due to exogenous factors, such as natural disasters, armed conflicts, or increased level of migration flows.

The Sustainable Development Goals—target 16.6—recognize that providing a sound basis for development requires that government budgets are comprehensive, transparent, and realistic.

This is measured through the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA)[1] indicator that assesses the difference between planned and actual budget expenditure in countries across the world.

Since 2005, 147 countries and 178 subnational governments have carried out a PEFA assessment, with national spending more likely to be on target than subnational spending.

The 2017 Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals: a new visual guide to data and development

World Bank Data Team's picture
Also available in: 中文 | العربية | Español | Français

The World Bank is pleased to release the 2017 Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals. With over 150 maps and data visualizations, the new publication charts the progress societies are making towards the 17 SDGs.

The Atlas is part of the World Development Indicators (WDI) family of products that offer high-quality, cross-country comparable statistics about development and people’s lives around the globe. You can:

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals and their associated 169 targets are ambitious. They will be challenging to implement, and challenging to measure. The Atlas offers the perspective of experts in the World Bank on each of the SDGs.

Trends, comparisons + country-level analysis for 17 SDGs

For example, the interactive treemap below illustrates how the number and distribution of people living in extreme poverty has changed between 1990 and 2013. The reduction in the number of poor in East Asia and Pacific is dramatic, and despite the decline in the Sub-Saharan Africa’s extreme poverty rate to 41 percent in 2013, the region’s population growth means that 389 million people lived on less than $1.90/day in 2013 - 113 million more than in 1990

Note: the light shaded areas in the treemap above represent the largest number of people living in extreme poverty in that country, in a single year, over the period 1990-2013.

Newly published data, methods and approaches for measuring development

World Bank challenges and opportunity in fragile states

Sharon Felzer's picture

The fragile and conflict situations in which the World Bank Group supports development programs are seen as a top and increasingly urgent strategic priority for the institution and donors, and the Bank Group is increasing attention and focus there (note the WBG’s paper “The Forward Look”). The statistics related to fragile situations are staggering. Two billion people live in countries where development outcomes are affected by fragility, conflict and violence. Nearly fifty percent of the global poor is predicted to be living in fragile and conflict affected situations by 2030. Terrorism incidents have increased and forced displacement is a global crisis.

The WBG pays close attention to what its key stakeholders in client countries think about development and the work of the Bank through its Country Opinion Survey program - a mandated survey effort that assesses the views of influential across the Bank’s client countries annually (40+ countries/year on three year cycles). By keeping ‘ears to the ground’ it can understand what the institution’s key stakeholders think about their own development situations, the Bank’s work within this context, and how the Bank can increase its value in these increasingly difficult and complicated situations. The data below reflects opinions from more than one thousand opinion leaders in FCV countries.

Machine-readable open data: how it’s applicable to developing countries

Audrey Ariss's picture

Where should telecom providers place their towers and what frequencies should they use?

How can governments best calculate commodity imports to ensure food security?

How can communities better manage areas at risks of floods?

These are just some of the questions that organizations around the world try to answer by using open government data — free, publicly available data that anyone can access and use, without restrictions. Yet around the world, much government data is yet to be made available, and still less in machine-readable [1]formats. In many low and lower-middle income countries, finding and using open data is often challenging. It may take a complicated request process to get data from the government, and the data may come in the form of paper-based documents that are very hard to analyze. A new study looks to better understand how organizations in low and lower-middle income countries utilize machine-readable open data.

In producing the study, the Center for Open Data Enterprise, supported by the World Bank, interviewed dozens of businesses and nonprofit organizations in 20 countries. The organizations were identified through the Open Data Impact Map, a public database of organizations that use open data around the world, and a resource of the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network. Over 50 use cases were developed as part of this study, each an example of open data use in a low or lower-middle income country.


 

Meet four women leading the drive for open data in Africa

David Mariano's picture

Editor’s note: This is a guest blog from Jeni Tennison, CEO at the Open Data Institute. This article was first published by This is Africa on 17th January 2017​.

 
Nkechi Okwuone

Across Africa, innovators are using open data to gain greater insight into local issues, and create new public services. From government open data platforms to startup accelerator programmes, open data is increasingly recognised as a tool for tackling challenges across a range of sectors including health, education and agriculture.

This autumn, in six cities across South Africa the Responsive Cities Challenge encouraged designers and entrepreneurs to use open data to develop solutions that will improve local government services. Meanwhile, in Burkina Faso, the CartEau project is using open data to map safe drinking water points and latrines across the country for the first time. These examples show how open data is a powerful vehicle for addressing complex problems.

Increasing digital connectivity is important for economic growth, education and democratic participation but the equalising force of the Web is only meaningful when everyone is included in the digital sphere. According to the Web Foundation, women face disproportionate barriers to access, with poor women in urban areas in 10 developing countries they looked at 50% less likely to be connected to the Internet than men in the same age group.

Open data – data anyone can access, use or share – is transformative infrastructure for a digital economy that is consistently innovating and bringing the benefits of the Web to society. Open data often goes hand in hand with open working cultures and open business practices. While this culture lends itself to diversity, it is important that those who are involved in open data make sure it addresses everyone's needs. It is therefore encouraging to see that open data initiatives in African countries are being led by women.

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