 I'm Salvatore Bobonas and today's lecture is Using the World Bank's World Development Indicators. The World Development Indicators database is the most comprehensive set of data on countries anywhere in the international data infrastructure. It includes data for 217 countries, territories, and economies going back as far as 1960. Notably absent however is Taiwan for political reasons the People's Republic of China prohibits the World Bank from reporting data on Taiwan. Most of the 1,452 data series in the WDI aren't actually collected by the World Bank itself. These are national data that are reported up to the World Bank by the member countries or they are data that are gleaned from other international data sets published by intergovernmental organizations like the IMF, the United Nations, or the World Health Organization. Note that most data series in the WDI are not reported in every year. So if you do a query and you get lots of blanks be sure to check alternative years because the data you're looking for may only be reported once every five years or on some other irregular basis. The link to the WDI is here but you can easily find it through Google. If you google World Bank WDI Data Bank you'll get a couple of links. The first link here takes you to a generic World Bank page in which it tells you about the WDI dataset and although I don't recommend it you can actually download the entire data bank here as an 80 megabyte Excel file or a 45 megabyte CSV. But also here is a link to the database itself and that link will take you the same place as this other result that will usually come up to the Data Bank query engine. The WDI is only one of many databases available from the World Bank. As you can see if you click on database there are lots of databases available to be queried through this engine but the WDI itself has already been selected so we'll leave it at that. Under country it shows 264 available but you'll notice that many of those are not actual countries. For example Arab world appears here. That's not a country it's an aggregate of countries and as you can see you can select either countries or aggregates. The aggregates are well entities like the entire Arab world pulled together or the Euro area or some special categories like heavily indebted poor countries. If you focus just on countries you'll see they're 217 and if you're doing some kind of global study you can just check all to select all 217. I'm going to uncheck those though and focus just on the four BRICS countries Brazil, Russia, India and China so I click on Brazil, China, India and Russia and just for comparison I'm going to include the United States as well. Next is to select the series you want. You can either use the series search box or you can look for series alphabetically. The only thing I strongly recommend against is selecting all series. Select the series only the series you want for downloading. I am going to look for G, GDP and I'm going to choose two different GDP operationalizations. I'm going to look at GDP per capita in current US dollars and GDP per capita in current purchasing power parity international dollars. These two series are the most popular ways of measuring gross domestic product. One converts GDP per capita into US dollars using the year's average exchange rate for each particular year of data and the other uses a purchasing power parity conversion essentially adjusting for the cost of living in each country. Finally you have to select the years for which you want to download data. You might select all but I'm going to look at just most recent 10 years. Note that even though I've selected 2016 I'm going to get all blanks for data for 2016 because I'm conducting this exercise on March 9th 2017 and as of March 9th the World Bank has not yet uploaded GDP data for 2016. So even though the selection is there I won't get any actual data. I click apply changes to view my data and as you can see I have the country as a page to choose from the variables as rows and the years as columns and as I said 2016 is blank but here you can see a massive drop in GDP per capita in Brazil between 2014 and 2015. Now in fact Brazil did go into recession in 2015 but this drop is vastly larger than the loss in GDP in that year and the reason is that the Brazilian Real lost value in 2015. As a result the recorded GDP per capita in US dollar terms fell dramatically. Notice that when the purchasing power parity adjustment is used the GDP fell only slightly. We can see a similar phenomenon looking at Russia. In Russia in 2015 there was an even sharper contraction in the value of the ruble due to US economic sanctions in the wake of Russian's annexation of Crimea and here you can see a huge drop in recorded GDP at current US dollar values but again a much shallower drop in purchasing power parity terms. All right well I could download this data just by going to download options and choosing how I would like to download it but first I'd like to demonstrate how you can reorganize the data to look at it in a different way. I'm going to switch from the variables tab to the layout tab and I'm going to choose a custom layout. I like having the time on the columns that's fine but I'm going to change the country to the rows and the series to the page and apply changes. As a result I can now pick any particular series and get a comparison of all five countries. So here I can see in clear contrast the GDP per capita in US dollar terms that China is roughly on a par with Brazil and Russia but only as a result of the currency devaluations of 2015. If I were to go back to 2014 I would see China well behind Russia and Brazil and in fact if I change to the purchasing power parity adjusted GDP per capita we'll see that phenomenon played out where even in 2015 Russia is well ahead of China with Brazil marginally ahead of China. Notice the huge difference in India purchasing power parity adjusted GDP per capita $6,100 but at exchange rates GDP per capita is much lower only $1,600 about one quarter as much. The reason is that the cost of living in India is extremely low. All right well I'd like to download these data I can download it directly into Excel which is probably the easiest thing to do for most people and when I check my desktop I'll find the data file there in the same format as I downloaded it. I have the first all five countries for GDP per capita and current dollars and then I have all five countries for GDP per capita by purchasing power parity. Annoyingly the World Bank adds these little tags at the bottom before you work with the database I recommend simply deleting that. Returning to the presentation the key takeaways are first download only the data you need from the world development indicators not the entire database. It can be useful to download extra years more than you need but certainly don't download every series in the database. Second remember that there are multiple GDP series available for most non-specialist users GDP per capita at current US dollars is good enough but academic and specialist users should definitely be aware of the difference between current US dollars constant US dollars purchasing power parity approaches to GDP. Finally all advanced users should learn how to use the layout orientation approaches so that you can set up a database that's appropriate to your needs. Thank you for listening I'm Salvatore Bebonus you can find out more about me at salvatorebebonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly Global Asia newsletter.