WDI (version 2.7.9)

WDI: WDI: World Development Indicators (World Bank)

Description

Downloads the requested data by using the World Bank's API, parses the resulting XML file, and formats it in long country-year format.

Usage

WDI(
  country = "all",
  indicator = "NY.GDP.PCAP.KD",
  start = 1960,
  end = NULL,
  extra = FALSE,
  cache = NULL,
  latest = NULL,
  language = "en"
)

Value

Data frame with country-year observations. You can extract a data.frame with indicator names and descriptive labels by inspecting the label attribute of the resulting data.frame: attr(dat, 'label')

Arguments

country

Vector of countries (ISO-2 character codes, e.g. "BR", "US", "CA") for which the data is needed. Using the string "all" instead of individual iso codes pulls data for every available country.

indicator

Character vector of indicators codes. See the WDIsearch() function. If you supply a named vector, the indicators will be automatically renamed: c('women_private_sector' = 'BI.PWK.PRVS.FE.ZS')

start

Start date, usually a year in integer format. Must be 1960 or greater.

end

End date, usually a year in integer format. Must be greater than the start argument. If NULL, the end date is set to 5 years in the future.

extra

TRUE returns extra variables such as region, iso3c code, and incomeLevel. See Details.

cache

NULL (optional) a list created by WDIcache() to be used with the extra=TRUE argument.

latest

Integer indicating the number of most recent non-NA values to get. Default is NULL. If specified, it overrides the start and end dates.

language

ISO-2 code in lower case indicating in which language the characters should be provided. List of languages available with WDI::languages_supported(). Default is English.

Author

Vincent Arel-Bundock

Details

It is possible to only specify the indicator and the country arguments, in which case WDI() will return data from 1960 to the last year available on World Bank's website. It is also possible to get only the most recent non-NA values, with latest.

If extra = TRUE, additional variables are provided:

• status: observation status, e.g is the observation a forecast?

• iso3c

• region

• capital: name of the capital city

• latitude, longitude

• income: income categories of the World Bank

• lending

Examples

if (FALSE) {

WDI(country="all", indicator=c("AG.AGR.TRAC.NO","TM.TAX.TCOM.BC.ZS"),
    start=1990, end=2000)
WDI(country=c("US","BR"), indicator="NY.GNS.ICTR.GN.ZS", start=1999, end=2000,
    extra=TRUE, cache=NULL)

# Rename indicators on the fly
WDI(country = 'CA', indicator = c('women_private_sector' = 'BI.PWK.PRVS.FE.ZS',
                                  'women_public_sector' = 'BI.PWK.PUBS.FE.ZS'))

# Get the 5 latest non-NA values
WDI(country=c("US","BR"), indicator="NY.GNS.ICTR.GN.ZS", latest = 5)
}