Thierry Warin, PhD: [API] WDI

Thierry Warin

doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.11763759.v2

Database description

“The primary World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources. It presents the most current and accurate global development data available, and includes national, regional and global estimates” (World Development Indicators, The World Bank)

World bank : https://www.worldbank.org/

Functions

This library gives access to all indicators provided by the World Bank. The functions listed below allow you to search and download specific data from the WDI database.

WDIsearch()
WDI()

Each of these functions are detailed in this course and some examples are provided.

WDIsearch()

The function WDIsearch() takes as an input any string of character and will provide the list of indicators containing this string of character.

For example, we would like to obtain all indicators using the term “GDP” from the database WDI.

#Loading the WDI library
library(WDI)

# Search all indicators with the term "GDP"
listOfIndicators <- WDIsearch("GDP")

# List the first 5 indicators
listOfIndicators[1:5,]

     indicator           
[1,] "5.51.01.10.gdp"    
[2,] "6.0.GDP_current"   
[3,] "6.0.GDP_growth"    
[4,] "6.0.GDP_usd"       
[5,] "6.0.GDPpc_constant"
     name                                                  
[1,] "Per capita GDP growth"                               
[2,] "GDP (current $)"                                     
[3,] "GDP growth (annual %)"                               
[4,] "GDP (constant 2005 $)"                               
[5,] "GDP per capita, PPP (constant 2011 international $) "

WDI()

The function WDI() takes as an input the indicator’s code and the country of the data wanted. It returns the value of the indicator for the countries selected. To search specific dates, it is possible to add as inputs the starting year and the ending year of the data.

For example, it would be interesting to evaluate the total amount of stocks traded in percentage of GDP (CM.MKT.TRAD.GD.ZS) for 4 countries (France - FR; Canada - CA; USA - US; China - CN) from 2000 to 2014. This could be obtained by using the function WDI() with the following inputs:

indicator = “CM.MKT.TRAD.GD.ZS”
country = c(“FR”, “CA”, “US”,“CN”)
start = 2000
end = 2014

# Access and store data concerning Stocks traded in total value (% of GDP)
stockTraded <- WDI(indicator = "CM.MKT.TRAD.GD.ZS", country = c("FR", "CA", "US","CN"), start = 2000, end = 2016)

head(stockTraded)

  iso2c country CM.MKT.TRAD.GD.ZS year
1    CA  Canada          75.47010 2016
2    CA  Canada          70.44847 2015
3    CA  Canada          74.53204 2014
4    CA  Canada          71.65306 2013
5    CA  Canada          73.72188 2012
6    CA  Canada          82.41163 2011

tl;dr

#Loading the WDI library
library(WDI)

# Search all indicators with the term "GDP"
listOfIndicators <- WDIsearch("GDP")

# List the first 5 indicators
listOfIndicators[1:5,]

stockTraded <- WDI(indicator = "CM.MKT.TRAD.GD.ZS", country = c("FR", "CA", "US","CN"), start = 2000, end = 2016)

head(stockTraded)

Code learned this week

Command	Detail
WDIsearch()	Search for world bank indicators
WDI()	Find data related to the indicators for each country

References

This tutorial uses the WDI package documentation

[API] WDI