darren-luo / WDI

World Bank Development indicators for R

The World Bank makes available a ton of great data from the World Development Indicators through its web API. The WDI package for R makes it easy to search and download data series from the WDI.

Installation

WDI is published on CRAN and so can be installed by simply typing this in the R console:

install.packages('WDI')

Searching for data

You can search for data by using keywords in WDIsearch. For instance, if you are looking for data on Gross Domestic Product:

WDIsearch('gdp')

Which produces this:

> WDIsearch('gdp')[1:10,]
      indicator              name                                                                      
 [1,] "BG.GSR.NFSV.GD.ZS"    "Trade in services (% of GDP)"                                            
 [2,] "BM.KLT.DINV.GD.ZS"    "Foreign direct investment, net outflows (% of GDP)"                      
 [3,] "BN.CAB.XOKA.GD.ZS"    "Current account balance (% of GDP)"                                      
 [4,] "BN.CUR.GDPM.ZS"       "Current account balance excluding net official capital grants (% of GDP)"
 [5,] "BN.GSR.FCTY.CD.ZS"    "Net income (% of GDP)"                                                   
 [6,] "BN.KLT.DINV.CD.ZS"    "Foreign direct investment (% of GDP)"                                    
 [7,] "BN.KLT.PRVT.GD.ZS"    "Private capital flows, total (% of GDP)"                                 
 [8,] "BN.TRF.CURR.CD.ZS"    "Net current transfers (% of GDP)"                                        
 [9,] "BNCABFUNDCD_"         "Current Account Balance, %GDP"                                           
[10,] "BX.KLT.DINV.WD.GD.ZS" "Foreign direct investment, net inflows (% of GDP)" 

WDIsearch uses grep and ignores cases, so you can also use regular expressions. For instance, if you are looking for GDP per capita in constant dollars:

WDIsearch('gdp.*capita.*constant')
     indicator           name                                                 
[1,] "GDPPCKD"           "GDP per Capita, constant US$, millions"             
[2,] "NY.GDP.PCAP.KD"    "GDP per capita (constant 2000 US$)"                 
[3,] "NY.GDP.PCAP.KN"    "GDP per capita (constant LCU)"                      
[4,] "NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD" "GDP per capita, PPP (constant 2005 international $)"

Download and use the data

Download a series you like for the countries you like:

dat = WDI(indicator='NY.GDP.PCAP.KD', country=c('MX','CA','US'), start=1960, end=2012)

Look at the data:

head(dat)
  iso2c country NY.GDP.PCAP.KD year
1    CA  Canada       9374.883 1960
2    CA  Canada       9479.824 1961
3    CA  Canada       9967.366 1962
4    CA  Canada      10290.362 1963
5    CA  Canada      10774.653 1964
6    CA  Canada      11283.606 1965

Plot the data:

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(dat, aes(year, NY.GDP.PCAP.KD, color=country)) + geom_line() + 
    xlab('Year') + ylab('GDP per capita')

Note: You can use country='all' to download data for all available countries. You can also feed a vector of indicator strings if you want to download multiple indicators at once.

Automatic rename

If the vector that you supply to WDI is named, the function will automatically rename columns where possible.

dat <- WDI(indicator = c("gdp_per_capita" = "NY.GDP.PCAP.KD",
                         "population" = "SP.POP.TOTL"))
head(dat)
iso2c    country year gdp_per_capita population
1    1A Arab World 2005       5378.379  316264728
2    1A Arab World 2006       5594.899  323773264
3    1A Arab World 2007       5711.663  331653797
4    1A Arab World 2008       5898.516  339825483
5    1A Arab World 2009       5782.422  348145094
6    1A Arab World 2010       5916.330  356508908

Updating series list

To speed up search, WDI ships with a local list of all available WDI series as of 2012-06-18. This list will be updated semi-regularly, but you may still want to update it manually to get access to the very latest data series. To do so, use the cache function:

new_cache = WDIcache()
WDIsearch('gdp', cache=new_cache)

Bugs, suggestions, etc.

Thanks for using WDI! Please send all bug reports and suggestions through the github issue tracker or by email at [e-mail]