“The website has something for everyone. Someone who just has one minute and really knows what they’re looking for, to someone who wants to do research and explore the database, or an application developer who wants to link to the database directly” - Shaida Badiee, Director Development Data Group, World Bank
WASHINGTON, April 20, 2010 — The World Development Indicators (WDI) 2010, released today, gives a statistical progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The WDI database, launched along with the World Bank’s Open Data initiative to provide free data to all users, includes more than 900 indicators documenting the state of all the world’s economies. The WDI covers education, health, poverty, environment, economy, trade, and much more.
For the Middle East and North Africa, the 2010 World Development Indicators support earlier World Bank findings—that a more vibrant private sector is essential to the region’s economic growth and efforts to reduce poverty.
The East Asia and Pacific region has emerged as a leader in the world reforestation effort due to significant increases in China, according to this year’s World Development Indicators report. While most countries in the region have lost forests since 1990, those losses have slowed since 2000. China and Vietnam are the only countries in the region that increased forest cover.
A subset of World Bank's World Development Indicator data is now available in Public Data Explorer, a project of Google Labs that provides visualization for several public data sets. The Data Explorer displays WDI data on several different types of graphs, as well as maps. Read more about the new Data Explorer at Inside the Web.
The World Bank DataFinder app for iPhone, which provides 50 years of indicator data in your pocket, is now available in the iTunes Store. The app takes advantage of the DataFinder APIs to chart and visualize indicator data, and makes it easy to share what you find with colleagues. Read more about the iPhone app at Inside the Web.
Accessing the World Bank's collection of data is now as easy as an ordinary Google search thanks to new integration between Google Public Data and the World Bank data API. Read more about the feature at Inside the Web.
