Third Party Apps

The World Bank’s Open Data Initiative, launched April 20, 2010, made key data sets including the World Development Indicators, Africa Development Indicators, Global Finance Indicators, and Doing Business Indicators free for all.

If you have an application that you’d like featured here, let us know.

Below are applications or libraries written using data from the World Bank API. Disclaimer: the World Bank Group is not responsible for and does not endorse the resources described below or the contents of their websites.

  • Google’s Public Data Explorer uses Google tools, including motion charts, to visualize and explore data from the World Bank and many other providers.

  • Drupal. The wbapi and wbquery modules provide request handling and views integration for the World Bank Data API. These modules make it easy to pull in data from the API and display it in custom “views.”

  • Python. wbgapi provides modern, pythonic access to the World Bank’s data API with an extensive pandas implementation. It is designed both for data novices and data scientists. pandas-datareader is a remote data access library for the pandas data analysis library; it offers access to World Bank data API’s as well as many other data sources. wbdata is another option that offers pandas integration, although it can also work independently.

    wbpy is another alternative, although it is no longer under active development; this module can also access the climate data api.

  • R. The WDI module and wbstats module offer excellent options for reading World Bank data directly into R, and both packages integrate with ggplot2 for graphing. Other option is to use the Quandl package, which also provides access to data sources from many other organizations.

    The rWBclimate package provides access to the climate data api.

  • Stata. wbopendata allows Stata users to download over 3,000 series of indicators from the World Bank databases. This module allows users live access to the databases using the API from within Stata. The worldstat module can be used to add charting and mapping features.