The World Bank — World Development Indicators (WDI)

Name: The World Bank — World Development Indicators (WDI)
Creator: The World Bank
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Open · redistributedCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)Development IndicatorsMacroeconomics

Redistributable. This source is served as canonical Parquet under the license below, with attribution and provenance preserved.

Coverage

Series catalogued

1,486

Temporal coverage

1960-12-31 – 2025-12-31

Frequencies

Annual

Licensing & provenance

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Required attribution: Source: The World Bank, World Development Indicators. Licence: CC BY 4.0.
Redistribution: Permitted (served here)
Commercial use: Yes
Modification: Permitted
Provider homepage: https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/
Provider terms: https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/legal/terms-of-use-for-datasets

How to cite

World Bank, World Development Indicators. Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org. Compiled and redistributed by the Elkassabgi Data Library.

Processing: Retrieved from the official source, normalized to a long {series_key, obs_date, value} schema (period-start dates), de-duplicated, and stored as zstd Parquet. Compiled and redistributed by the Elkassabgi Data Library.

Access & mirrors

Download: Select & download worldbank_wdi series as CSV →
API: Get a free API key, then GET /v1/series/<id>.csv
Canonical landing: https://econdatalibrary.com/worldbank_wdi
Update cadence: quarterly
Automated refresh: live — this database is on the daily update run
Update strategy: bulk snapshot if changed
Storage layout: single zstd parquet data/clean_full/worldbank_wdi/worldbank_wdi.parquet (~60 MB, ~8.9M obs), schema (series_key 'WDI:{ind}:{ctry}', obs_date date32 year-end, value float64). Written via ParquetWriter in 1M-row batches to one file. Code has a commented intent to split if >100M rows but BATCH only chunks writes, never splits files.

Full description

World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI) -- full bulk ingest. Source: https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/ License: CC BY 4.0 Coverage: ~1,400 indicators × 260+ countries, 1960-present Downloads the official WDI bulk CSV ZIP from the World Bank data API, parses the wide-format WDICSV.csv into long format, and writes one Parquet file per indicator batch (to avoid millions of tiny files). series_key format: WDI:{IndicatorCode}:{CountryCode} e.g. WDI:NY.GDP.MKTP.KD:USA Output: data/clean_full/worldbank_wdi/ worldbank_wdi.parquet (all indicators concatenated) OR one parquet per indicator if total > 100M rows Run: python jobs/ingest_worldbank_wdi.py

Structured metadata

schema.org/Dataset (Google Dataset Search)

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Croissant (ML-ready, schema.org JSON-LD)

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Part of the Econ Data Library catalog · metadata generated 2026-08-02 from the central registry · browse all datasets