Home › Data Sources

Data Sources

World Bank Open Data

All country and indicator data on CountryDataHub.com is sourced from the World Bank Open Data portal via its public REST API (API v2). No authentication is required — the data is freely available to anyone.

Countries: https://api.worldbank.org/v2/country?format=json

Indicators: https://api.worldbank.org/v2/indicator/{code}?format=json

Data: https://api.worldbank.org/v2/country/all/indicator/{code}?format=json&mrv=20

What Data Is Included

We currently load the top 50 most useful indicators by coverage — indicators that have data for at least 30 countries. Indicators with very sparse coverage are excluded to avoid thin, low-quality pages. The full World Bank database contains thousands of indicators; we focus on the most widely reported ones that are useful for country comparison.

Indicators span these categories:

  • Economy: GDP, GNP, GDP per capita, GDP growth, inflation, government debt
  • Health & Population: Life expectancy, population, infant mortality, fertility rate, healthcare expenditure
  • Education: School enrollment, literacy rate, education expenditure
  • Environment: CO2 emissions, arable land, surface area
  • Energy: Electricity access, electric power consumption
  • Trade & Finance: Exports, imports, trade as % of GDP, FDI, ODA
  • Labor & Business: Unemployment, labor force participation
  • Technology: Internet users, mobile subscriptions, high-tech exports

Data Currency

The World Bank publishes updated data periodically — most macroeconomic indicators are updated annually, with a 1–2 year lag. For example, 2023 GDP figures may not appear until 2024 or 2025. Our ETL pipeline fetches the 20 most recent values per indicator per country, so our data reflects what the World Bank has published as of our last ETL run.

We store "most recent value" (MRV) in the country_stats table to power fast country profile pages without real-time aggregation.

Missing and Suppressed Values

A NULL value in our database — displayed as "Not available" on the site — means the World Bank has not published a value for that country and year. There are several reasons this can happen:

  • The country did not report the data to the World Bank
  • The data is statistically unreliable and has been suppressed
  • The indicator is not applicable to that country
  • The data collection methodology changed and historical values are not comparable

We never estimate or impute missing values. If data is not available, we say so clearly.

Data License

World Bank data is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license. You are free to use, share, and adapt the data with attribution to the World Bank.

Our descriptions, commentary, and site design are original works of Long Pattern LLC and are not covered by the CC BY license.