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wbids

wbids is an R package to access and analyze the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics (IDS). IDS provides creditor-debtor relationships between countries, regions, and institutions. ‘wbids’ enables users to download, process and work with IDS series across multiple entities, counterparts, and time periods.

The wbids package relies on a redefinition of the original World Bank data: ‘entities’ contain both countries and regions, while ‘counterparts’ include both counterpart areas and institutions. wbids provides a consistent mapping of identifiers and names across these different types. The corresponding package vignette provides more details on the data model.

The package is part of the EconDataverse family of packages aimed at helping economists and financial professionals work with sovereign-level economic data.

This package is a product of Teal Insights and not sponsored by or affiliated with the World Bank in any way, except for the use of the World Bank IDS API.

Installation

You can install wbids from CRAN via:

You can also install the development version of wbids like this:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("teal-insights/r-wbids")

On Linux, you may need to install libcurl4-openssl-dev as a prerequisite to build the package.

Usage

The main function ids_get() provides an interface to download multiple IDS series for multiple entities and counterparts and specific date ranges.

library(wbids)

ids_get(
  entities = c("ZMB", "ZAF"),
  series = c("DT.DOD.DPPG.CD", "BM.GSR.TOTL.CD"),
  counterparts = c("216", "231"),
  start_year = 2015,
  end_year = 2020
)
#> # A tibble: 48 × 5
#>    entity_id series_id      counterpart_id  year     value
#>    <chr>     <chr>          <chr>          <int>     <dbl>
#>  1 ZMB       BM.GSR.TOTL.CD 231             2015        NA
#>  2 ZMB       BM.GSR.TOTL.CD 216             2015        NA
#>  3 ZMB       DT.DOD.DPPG.CD 231             2015        NA
#>  4 ZMB       DT.DOD.DPPG.CD 216             2015 193907000
#>  5 ZMB       BM.GSR.TOTL.CD 231             2016        NA
#>  6 ZMB       BM.GSR.TOTL.CD 216             2016        NA
#>  7 ZMB       DT.DOD.DPPG.CD 231             2016        NA
#>  8 ZMB       DT.DOD.DPPG.CD 216             2016 180118000
#>  9 ZMB       BM.GSR.TOTL.CD 231             2017        NA
#> 10 ZMB       BM.GSR.TOTL.CD 216             2017        NA
#> # ℹ 38 more rows

The package comes with prepared metadata about available series, entities, counterparts, and topics. Please consult the package vignette for details.

This data can be used to enrich the IDS series or facilitate data discovery. For further applications, please consult Teal Insights’ Guide to Working with the World Bank International Debt Statistics.

The package also provides a convenience function to download the full IDS data pre-processed with wbids from the corresponding EconDataverse dataset on Hugging Face via the econdatasets package:

ids_get_ed("debt_statistics")
#> → Reading dataset from
#>   https://huggingface.co/datasets/econdataverse/wbids/resolve/main/debt_statistics.parquet
#> ✔ Successfully loaded debt_statistics from wbids
#> # A tibble: 144,526,432 × 5
#>    entity_id series_id           counterpart_id  year value
#>    <chr>     <chr>               <chr>          <int> <dbl>
#>  1 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2006     0
#>  2 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2007     0
#>  3 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2008     0
#>  4 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2009     0
#>  5 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2010     0
#>  6 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2011     0
#>  7 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2012     0
#>  8 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2013     0
#>  9 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2014     0
#> 10 AFG       DT.DIS.BLAT.PRVG.CD 625             2015     0
#> # ℹ 144,526,422 more rows

The interface and column names are fully consistent with World Development Indicators (WDI) data provided through the wbwdi package. You can find details on github.com/tidy-intelligence/r-wbwdi.

Contributing

Contributions to wbids are welcome! If you’d like to contribute, please follow these steps:

  1. Create an issue: Before making changes, create an issue describing the bug or feature you’re addressing.
  2. Fork the repository: Fork the repository to your GitHub account.
  3. Create a branch: Create a branch for your changes with a descriptive name.
  4. Make your changes: Implement your bug fix or feature.
  5. Test your changes: Run tests to ensure your changes don’t break existing functionality.
  6. Submit a pull request: Push your changes to your fork and submit a pull request to the main repository.

For more detailed information on the package structure and development process, please visit the project Wiki.

Package Structure

The package is organized around three main functional groups:

graph TB
    A[wbids] --> B[ids_list_*]
    A --> C[ids_get]
    A --> D[ids_bulk*]

    B --> B1[ids_list_counterparts]
    B --> B2[ids_list_entities]
    B --> B3[ids_list_series]
    B --> B4[ids_list_series_topics]

    D --> D1[ids_bulk]
    D --> D2[ids_bulk_files]
    D --> D3[ids_bulk_series]

    classDef default fill:#fff,stroke:#333,color:#333
    classDef main fill:#f9f,stroke:#333,color:#000,font-weight:bold
    classDef group fill:#bbf,stroke:#333,color:#000

    class A main
    class B,C,D group
    class B1,B2,B3,B4,D1,D2,D3 default