World Bank — Development Indicators and Country Data

The World Bank Open Data API. Thousands of development, economic, social, and demographic indicators for every country. Time series going back decades. The canonical source for cross-country comparisons of poverty, education, health, gender, environment, infrastructure. Free, no auth.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1867+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Why this matters for AI agents

For development questions, cross-country comparisons of social indicators, or any "how does country X compare on indicator Y" question, the World Bank's database is the right starting point. Complements IMF (macro/fiscal) with development-specific coverage (WDI, EdStats, GenderStats, etc.).

Common flows:

• Indicator lookup. "GDP per capita PPP for India" → World Bank indicator NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD for India.
• Country comparison. Same indicator across multiple countries.
• Theme browsing. Education indicators, health indicators, environment indicators, etc.

Auth

None. World Bank Open Data is fully public, free.

Indicator code structure

World Bank indicator codes follow a domain.theme.metric pattern:

Search the catalog when you don't know the code.

Country and country-group codes

World Bank uses ISO 3-letter codes (USA, BRA, IND) plus aggregate codes:

• WLD — World
• EUU — European Union
• LMC — Lower middle income
• OED — OECD members
• SSA — Sub-Saharan Africa

Aggregate codes are useful for "how does X compare to its peer group?" questions.

Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI)

The World Bank also publishes the Worldwide Governance Indicators — six governance-quality dimensions per country, useful as country-risk context alongside event/news data: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These live in a separate World Bank source database from the general development indicators above, under codes like GOV_WGI_CC.EST (Control of Corruption, governance estimate) and GOV_WGI_CC.SC (same dimension, 0–100 percentile-style score) — reachable through this pack's existing get_indicator / compare_countries tools, but unguessable without knowing the code, so use the dedicated get_governance_indicators tool for a single country's full six-dimension snapshot (latest year + prior year, for trend).

Each .EST estimate runs approximately -2.5 (weakest) to +2.5 (strongest); the matching .SC code is a 0–100 percentile-style score, higher meaning stronger governance relative to other countries scored that year.

Common pitfalls

• Indicator deprecation. World Bank periodically retires/replaces indicators. The API marks deprecated ones; prefer current ones for new analysis.
• Coverage gaps. Not every country reports every indicator every year. The API returns nulls for missing data. Compute aggregates carefully.
• Vintages. Indicator values can be revised. Cite the vintage if precision matters.
• Real vs nominal. Many financial indicato

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