Thursday, 17 February 2011

World Bank Development Data in Stata

WBOPENDATA has been added to the utilities available through the RLAB stata licenses.

If you have your own stata license and would like to install WBOPENDATA the command is:

ssc install wbopendata

WBOPENDATA draws from the main World Bank collections of development indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources, and made available through the World Bank Open Data Initiative, and presents the most current and accurate global development data available, and includes national, regional and global estimates. Users can chose from one of three of the languages supported by the database, namely, English, Spanish, or French. Three possible downloads options are currently supported: country - all indicators for all years for a single country. topic - all indicators within a specific topic, for all years and all countries. indicator - all years for all countries for a single indicator. Users can also choose to have the data displayed in either the wide or long format (wide is the default option).

For example, to download all data available for the Philippines for all years, type:

wbopendata, country(phl) clear

This returns data for 972 indicators from 1960 to the latest year available. The default data display is in wide format.

The list of countries, topics, and indicators and their corresponding codes are documented in the help file (see -help wbopendata-).

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