Silent archival of World Development Indicators: data unavailability for retired WDI series through the World Bank API

Viacheslav Poshatskii

No 4uwm3_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: The World Bank publishes over 1,000 time series in its World Development Indicators (WDI) catalogue, yet individual series are periodically retired. Using WDI's own archival metadata, we document that 1,338 currently unlisted series codes are absent from the public API and bulk-download catalogue, and that none of 40 retired series queried returned data through the World Bank's official API. We treat this as a silent-archival phenomenon: series disappear from the catalogue without public notice, release of a cessation report, or an archival dataset. We characterize the scale of the phenomenon, the metadata signals that identify retired series, and the resulting implications for reproducibility of economic research that relies on WDI time series.

Date: 2026-08-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6a7d331cd2cfedf519a5924f/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:4uwm3_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/4uwm3_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().