TCdata360: Filling Gaps in Open Trade and Competitiveness Data

The World Bank Group just launched a new open data platform for trade and competitiveness – TCdata360. Try it today and share your visuals on Twitter with the hashtag #TCdata360.

Open data – statistics that are accessible to all at little or no cost – is a critical component of global development and the World Bank Group’s twin goals of ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity. How can we measure progress towards our objectives without a method of tracking how far we’ve come?

High quality and freely available data serves different stakeholders in different ways. For those of us working in global development, data helps us set baselines, identify what types of policies are effective, track progress and evaluate impact. For the private sector, open data helps companies operate more efficiently, identify areas where industries can improve, and pinpoint areas for new investment. Citizens benefit from open data by getting an understanding of what governments are doing to help them, and transparent data can help reinforce trust. The public sector utilizes data in many ways, including tracking progress against peers and pinpointing areas where countries might be excelling or lagging behind.

The World Bank Group offers a variety of open data sources for public use. The newest platform, TCdata360, focuses on trade and competitiveness and aggregates thousands of data points from dozens of vetted sources. This type of high quality data helps us get an unbiased, objective, and comprehensive view of how the world economy works and demonstrates how all the pieces of the global economy are integrated. Without it, there would be no evidence base on areas that we know to be critical for development, such as global value chains, foreign direct investment, or even starting new businesses.

TCdata360 has three distinct advantages over other data websites:

• It’s comprehensive.  TCdata360 offers 2,000 indicators aggregated from across more than 20 data sources. These sources include other well-known World Bank Group data sets such as Doing Business, the Logistics Performance Index, and the World Development Indicators, as well as data from other reputable sources, including the IMF, World Economic Forum, United Nations, and WTO. It’s a one-stop shop for all things trade and competitiveness, one that does not exist anywhere else
   
• It’s constantly updated. Because TCdata360 pulls data from other sources as soon as they are updated, TCdata360 is updated. This eliminates the need for searching around for the most current figures on trade and competitiveness – TCdata360 will always be current.
   
• It’s easy to use. You do not need to be a trade expert or economist to use TCdata360. There are no complicated queries to manage or spreadsheets to navigate. The site is visual and is based on easy-to-interpret charts, graphs and maps, which are all downloadable and shareable. It’s simple, interactive and visual. For advanced users, it offers features like an API (application programming interface).

My core belief is that there is no other place in the world where you can find a deeper, richer, broader, multi-country, trustworthy set of private-sector related data than in the World Bank Group. TCdata360 is an extension of this that fills what we see as an obvious data usability gap for trade and competitiveness. Our hope is that TCdata360 will not only make the World Bank Group’s trade and competitiveness data more accessible, but that it will also bring other data points out into the open, shed light on remaining gaps, and continue to connect monitoring and measurement with the Sustainable Development Goals.

Try it today and share your data visualizations on Twitter with the hashtag #TCdata360.