World Bank Indicators API

What it covers

Public access to World Bank development indicators and their country, source, and topic metadata. The profile stays deliberately concise: use the linked official reference for endpoint schemas and current commercial terms.

Integration notes

Authenticate exactly as the provider documents, keep credentials out of client bundles, and retain upstream request identifiers when available. Pagination, retries, caching, and webhook verification should be implemented per product rather than inferred from another API.

Key endpoints

Endpoint	Description
GET /v2/country/{code}/indicator/{indicator}	Country indicator data
GET /v2/country	List countries
GET /v2/country/{code}	Country details
GET /v2/indicator/{indicator}	Indicator metadata
GET /v2/region	List regions
GET /v2/sources	Data sources

Decision notes

Best suited to cross-country development indicators and long-run public datasets. Before production, verify v1 endpoints no longer work. revisions and missing country-year values require explicit handling. Mutable limits, prices, and versions were checked on 2026-09-13 and should be rechecked at purchase or deployment time.

Python example: country indicators (no auth)

import httpx

BASE = "https://api.worldbank.org/v2"

def get_indicator(country: str, indicator: str, per_page: int = 20) -> list[dict]:
    """Fetch an indicator series. Metadata sits in element [0], data in [1]."""
    resp = httpx.get(
        f"{BASE}/country/{country}/indicator/{indicator}",
        params={"format": "json", "per_page": per_page},
        timeout=30,
    )
    resp.raise_for_status()
    data = resp.json()
    rows = []
    for entry in data[1] or []:
        if entry["value"] is None:
            continue
        rows.append({"year": int(entry["date"]), "value": entry["value"]})
    return rows

# US GDP growth (annual %) — indicator NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG
for r in get_indicator("US", "NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG", per_page=5):
    print(r["year"], r["value"])

Notes:

• No authentication required; format=json avoids XML
• Response is a 2-element list: [metadata, data] — data may be None for bad queries
• value is None for missing years; filter before use
• Country codes are ISO3 (US, KR, CN); use all for every country (paginates)