World Economic Outlook, October 2026: the two big groups, as the IMF lays them out

Six rows from the IMF's World Economic Outlook (WEO) database of October 2026, in the layout the IMF publishes. One row is one country group and one indicator, with the years across as columns. The two groups, Advanced Economies and Emerging Market and Developing Economies, together cover the world. The three indicators, the primary balance, the overall balance and GDP, are all you need to work out what the world's governments pay in interest.

Usage

weo_groups

Format

A tibble with 6 rows and 36 variables:

group_code: chr The IMF's code for the group: G110 for Advanced Economies, G200 for Emerging Market and Developing Economies (COUNTRY.ID in the IMF's file).
group: chr The group's name, as the IMF writes it (COUNTRY).
indicator: chr The IMF's code for the indicator (INDICATOR.ID): GGXONLB_NGDP is the primary balance, GGXCNL_NGDP the overall balance, and NGDPD GDP at current prices.
indicator_name: chr The indicator's full name, as the IMF writes it (INDICATOR), such as "Net lending (+) / net borrowing (-), General government, Percent of GDP".
units: chr How to read the numbers: "Percent of GDP" for the two balances and "Billions of US dollars" for GDP (the IMF's SCALE and UNIT columns, in plain words).
2001 to 2031: dbl One column per year, holding the indicator's value that year. From 2026 on the values are IMF projections. The names are numbers, so wrap them in backticks when you use them: `2025`.

Source

International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, October 2026, https://data.imf.org/en/datasets/IMF.RES:WEO. Built by data-raw/weo_groups.R from data-raw/source/weo_2026oct_extract.csv, an extract of the IMF's workbook WEOOct2026all.xlsx.

Details

This is what data look like in the wild. To work with them in R you tidy them first: tidyr::pivot_longer() turns the year columns into rows, and tidyr::pivot_wider() turns the indicators into columns.

Net interest in billions of US dollars is the primary balance minus the overall balance, times GDP, divided by 100. Added up over the two groups it comes to about USD 849 billion in 2001 and USD 2,371.2 billion in 2025. The groups' balances are averages of their members' balances, weighted by GDP, so this total is an approximation.

The years start in 2001, the first year the IMF gives a primary balance for both groups.

Vintage

The IMF's World Economic Outlook database of October 2026. This table is a frozen snapshot of that release: it does not change when the IMF publishes a new WEO or revises these numbers.

Transformations

The IMF's workbook WEOOct2026all.xlsx went through two steps. First, an extract stacked its Countries and Country Groups sheets, kept 13 of 44 indicators, the years 2000 to 2031 and 9 of 29 descriptive columns, and wrote each number in its shortest form. Second, data-raw/weo_groups.R kept these six rows and the years 2001 to 2031, renamed five columns, and wrote the IMF's SCALE and UNIT in plain words. No number was changed.

Credit

Print this line under every chart you make from these data:

Source: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, October 2026, https://data.imf.org/en/datasets/IMF.RES:WEO. Country groups: The World Bank: World Development Indicators: country and lending groups (CC BY 4.0). Net interest is the primary balance minus the overall balance, calculated for this workshop.

Drop the second sentence if your chart uses no World Bank groups, and the third if it shows no net interest.

Terms of use

The package's MIT license does not cover these data. They are under the special terms for statistical data on the IMF's Copyright and Usage page, https://www.imf.org/en/About/copyright-and-terms (effective 11 October 2024, read on 6 November 2026), which name the World Economic Outlook database. You may download, extract, copy, build on, publish and distribute the data if you credit the IMF in the form above, do not alter the data in a way that intentionally affects their nature or accuracy, and say so next to the credit when you materially transform them. If you pass the data on, make reasonable efforts to tell your users about these terms. The IMF gives no warranty. For any potential commercial reuse, ask copyright@imf.org first. The IMF's general terms still apply where the data terms are silent: imply no endorsement, and do not use its content to train large language models without its explicit permission. See system.file("LICENSE-data.md", package = "saisdata").

This package is not an official IMF or World Bank product.

Examples

# Six rows: two groups times three indicators
nrow(weo_groups)
#> [1] 6

# Five columns that describe each row, then one column per year
names(weo_groups)
#>  [1] "group_code"     "group"          "indicator"      "indicator_name"
#>  [5] "units"          "2001"           "2002"           "2003"          
#>  [9] "2004"           "2005"           "2006"           "2007"          
#> [13] "2008"           "2009"           "2010"           "2011"          
#> [17] "2012"           "2013"           "2014"           "2015"          
#> [21] "2016"           "2017"           "2018"           "2019"          
#> [25] "2020"           "2021"           "2022"           "2023"          
#> [29] "2024"           "2025"           "2026"           "2027"          
#> [33] "2028"           "2029"           "2030"           "2031"