woRldbank: use WDI for econometrics - 2020 Shiny Contest Submission

woRldbank: use WDI for econometrics

Authors: Etienne Bacher
Working with Shiny <1 year

Abstract: Building on the WDI package, this Shiny app aims to facilitate the gathering of World Bank data in Development Economics (i.e, the World Development Indicators, a.k.a WDI) for those who are not comfortable with R. It allows to import the WDI wanted thanks to their ID, to manipulate them (type of data, countries, years, plot, etc.), to merge them and finally to download the result. It also shows the R code necessary to reproduce these manipulations.

Full Description: In econometrics, a lot of time is given to data gathering, cleaning, merging, etc. The aim of this Shiny app is to reduce this time in several ways. First, it allows to import the World Development Indicators with their ID. Once the data is imported, the user can choose the type of data he/she wants: cross-sectional data, time series or panel data. Then, he/she can choose the countries and time periods chosen, and can generate a (downloadable) graph representing the indicator. The logarithm and squared value of the data can also be created (as well as the lagged value for data with a time dimension), since they are often used in econometric studies. Besides, to make these manipulations reproducible, the R code corresponding to the user's actions is automatically generated for each dataset, thanks to the shinymeta package. This makes it easier for those who are not comfortable with R to see how one deals with the World Bank data. Once the user has imported all the WDI he/she wanted, he/she can merge them in one unique dataset. This final dataset is then downloadable in several formats (CSV, Excel, R, Stata, SPSS, SAS).

Thanks to the StackOverflow and RStudio communities who indirectly helped me a lot with their answers.


Category: Research
Keywords: econometrics, World Development Indicators, data gathering
Shiny app: https://etiennebacher.shinyapps.io/woRldbank/
Repo: GitHub - etiennebacher/woRldbank: A Shiny app to import, manipulate and download data from the World Development Indicators
RStudio Cloud: Posit Cloud

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