World Development Indicators 2016

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The latest edition has now been published. This is always an interesting resource, as it shows progress across the world in the last year in meeting or working towards certain development goals.

Download, or read online as an ISSUU document.

One important change is there is no longer a distinction between developing and developed countries in the report as has previously been the case.

In WDI 2016, there is no longer a distinction between developing countries (defined in previous editions as low- and middle-income countries) and developed countries (previously high-income countries). Regional groupings (such as “East Asia”) are now based on geographical coverage rather than a sub-set of countries that were previously referred to as developing. In some occasional cases, where data availability or context have dictated it, we’ve excluded high income from some charts or tables, and we’ve indicated that in the footnotes.
Two implications of this change are that a new aggregate for North America has been included in tables, and aggregates for Europe and Central Asia include countries of the European Union.
The work of Hans Rosling has to be part of the reason for this change, and a recognition that such divisions are increasingly harder to make.

The data are available in a wide range of formats too:

All the data in World Development Indicators is available completely free of charge, as part of the World Bank’s Open Data Initiative. A complete list of tools to access, explore, and interact with WDI 2016 are available at  http://data.worldbank.org/wdi and include:

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