World Bank Open Data: free country indicators for market sizing

The site: World Bank Open Data. Cost: Free. Useful for: culture and countries.

What it is

World Bank Open Data is the World Bank’s portal for global development data, which it describes as free and open access. Its core is the World Development Indicators, a long-running collection of country statistics on the economy, population, health, education, infrastructure and more.

You can browse by economy or by indicator, view each series as a line chart, bar chart or map, and download it. Indicator pages give the licence as CC BY-4.0, so you can reuse the data as long as you credit the source. For more control there is DataBank, a tool for building your own tables across countries, series and years.

Use it for

• Quick market sizing inputs such as population, GDP and GDP per head
• Comparing structural factors across countries, such as urbanisation or internet use
• Building a country fact sheet for a pitch, report or case study
• Pulling long time series for coursework or a simple model

It is the natural first stop when you need an official, citable number for a country and do not yet know which national statistics office to trust.

How to use it

1. Go to data.worldbank.org and choose to browse by Economy or by Indicator.
2. Open an indicator, for example GDP growth (annual %), to see the world chart and a country table with the most recent year and value.
3. Switch between the Line, Bar and Map views to spot outliers and trends.
4. Use the download links to save the series as CSV, XML or Excel.
5. For a custom table with several countries and indicators, open DataBank from the same page.

Write down the indicator code and the date you downloaded the data. Both make it easy to refresh the numbers later and to explain any differences.

Example

An analyst comparing Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines for a consumer launch can open the population, GDP per capita and internet use indicators in turn. Each page gives the most recent value for every country, and the Excel download puts the full history into a sheet, ready for a simple comparison table.

Watch out for

• The most recent year differs by country and indicator, so check the dates before you compare.
• Figures are revised, sometimes heavily, so note the download date in your work.
• National averages hide large regional and income differences within a country.

It works well alongside IMF DataMapper, Our World in Data and OECD Data.