The World Bank Data Portal provides access to global economic and social statistics including World Development Indicators, International Debt Statistics, Millennium Development Indicators and data on poverty, education and gender. The annual World Development Report is available online.
World Development Indicators are presented in six dimensions: World View, People, Environment, Economy, States/Markets and Global Links.
WDI has been issued annually since 1960. The Users Guide provides further information about methodology and definitions.
The annual World Development Report (1978-2023) is available online with supporting data, maps and analytical papers. Multi-lingual synopses are available.
International Debt Statistics is the World Bank's database on external debt and financial flows (debt and equity) providing over 200 indicators for 128 countries in the Debtor Reporting System. Data is from 1970 to present. The database combines observations from 'Quarterly External Debt Statistics' and 'Quarterly Public Sector Debt' published by the World Bank. (IDS was formerly known as 'Global Development Finance.')
The IDS database is updated annually, with a narrative account of recent trends and tables summarising capital flows and debt statistics for reporting countries. IDS contains more than 200 debt and financial flow indicators.
The Global Consumption Database - maintained by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation - is a "one-stop source of data on household consumption patterns in developing countries."
Data are based on national household surveys over four levels of consumption for each country: lowest, low, middle and higher. A note on the standardisation of the database is on this World Bank page.
The World Bank Subnational Population Database covers 1,350 provincial, state and regional sub-state units worldwide, and can be used for research on population distribution, development, intra-regional migration and urbanisation. Access the database via the World Bank portal. The database contains time series “population estimates for 75 countries… and includes the total population numbers for each area and the shares relative to total national population estimates.”
The World Bank provides the following caution: “In constructing this dataset, one of the biggest challenges is handling the changing subnational boundaries. As a result, some subnational population estimates might not reflect the current first level administrative unit framework."
The Database of Political Institutions provides "institutional and electoral results data such as measures of checks and balances, tenure and stability of the government, identification of party affiliation and ideology, and fragmentation of opposition and government parties in the legislature, among others." Data is available in a zipped Stata file. Instructions on using ZIP files to compress and decompress data are available on this EUI page.
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Page last updated on 20 July 2024