🌍 World Bank Data Scraper

🚀 Export World Bank economic indicators in seconds. GDP, population, inflation and 16,000+ indicators across 200+ countries - no sign-up, no API key, ready for CSV, Excel, JSON or XML download.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-21 · 📊 9 fields per record · 16,000+ indicators · 200+ countries

The World Bank Open Data API is one of the most comprehensive sources of global economic, social, and development statistics. This actor fetches real-time data directly from the official World Bank REST API - no scraping, no parsing HTML, just clean structured records ready for analysis.

Each record represents one country-year data point for your chosen indicator: GDP, population, inflation rate, literacy rate, CO2 emissions, and thousands more. Data is sourced directly from World Bank's World Development Indicators (WDI) database, updated annually with official national statistics.

This actor gives you full programmatic access to the same data powering the World Bank's own dashboards - delivered to your Apify dataset in seconds.

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👥 Target Audience / Use Cases

Who	What they do with it
Economists and researchers	Build multi-country datasets for academic papers and reports
Data journalists	Pull GDP or poverty data for news articles and infographics
Financial analysts	Track macroeconomic indicators for investment research
Policy consultants	Compare development metrics across regions and income groups
NGOs and nonprofits	Monitor progress on SDG targets and development goals
Students and educators	Access real-world data for coursework and teaching materials
Developers and data engineers	Feed economic data into dashboards, pipelines, and models
Business strategists	Benchmark markets and identify high-growth emerging economies

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📋 What the World Bank Scraper does

• Fetches any of the 16,000+ World Bank indicators by code (e.g. NY.GDP.MKTP.CD for GDP)
• Retrieves data for multiple countries in a single run using ISO 2-letter codes
• Returns up to 10 years of most-recent values (mrv=10) per country per indicator
• Includes indicator metadata: full name, unit of measure, and source description note
• Outputs clean structured records with countryId, countryName, year, value, and more
• Automatically limits free users to 10 items as a preview; paid users get up to 1,000,000
• Works entirely on the public World Bank REST API - no authentication required

💡 Why it matters: The World Bank is the authoritative source for global development data used by governments, the UN, the IMF, and thousands of researchers. Getting this data programmatically - rather than clicking through the World Bank portal - saves hours of manual export work and enables automation, monitoring, and large-scale analysis.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon

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⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
countryCodes	Array of strings	Yes	["US","CN","GB","DE","JP"]	ISO 2-letter country codes
indicatorCode	String	Yes	NY.GDP.MKTP.CD	World Bank indicator code
maxItems	Integer	No	10	Max records to collect (1-1,000,000)

Example 1 - GDP for major economies:

{
  "countryCodes": ["US", "CN", "GB", "DE", "JP"],
  "indicatorCode": "NY.GDP.MKTP.CD",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example 2 - Population for BRICS nations:

{
  "countryCodes": ["BR", "RU", "IN", "CN", "ZA"],
  "indicatorCode": "SP.POP.TOTL",
  "maxItems": 100
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Popular indicator codes include NY.GDP.MKTP.CD (GDP current USD), SP.POP.TOTL (Total Population), FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG (Inflation CPI %), SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS (Unemployment %), NY.GDP.PCAP.CD (GDP per capita), SI.POV.GINI (Gini index). Browse all 16,000+ codes at data.worldbank.org/indicator.

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📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
🌍 countryId	String	ISO 2-letter country code (e.g. US)
🏳️ countryName	String	Full country name (e.g. United States)
📋 indicatorId	String	World Bank indicator code
📊 indicatorName	String	Human-readable indicator name
📅 year	Integer	Data year
💹 value	Number/null	Indicator value for that country-year
📏 unit	String/null	Unit of measure (if available)
📝 sourceNote	String/null	World Bank methodology description
🕒 scrapedAt	String	ISO 8601 timestamp of data collection
❌ error	String/null	Error message if fetch failed

Sample records (3 real examples from a live run):

[
  {
    "countryId": "US",
    "countryName": "United States",
    "indicatorId": "NY.GDP.MKTP.CD",
    "indicatorName": "GDP (current US$)",
    "year": 2024,
    "value": 28750956130731.2,
    "unit": null,
    "sourceNote": "Gross domestic product is the total income earned through the production of goods and services in an economic territory during an accounting period. It can be measured in three different ways: using either the expenditure approach, the income approach, or the production approach. This indicator is expressed in current prices, meaning no adjustment has been made to account for price changes over time. This indicator is expressed in United States dollars.",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-21T22:34:29.663Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "countryId": "US",
    "countryName": "United States",
    "indicatorId": "NY.GDP.MKTP.CD",
    "indicatorName": "GDP (current US$)",
    "year": 2023,
    "value": 27292170793214.4,
    "unit": null,
    "sourceNote": "Gross domestic product is the total income earned through the production of goods and services in an economic territory during an accounting period...",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-21T22:34:29.663Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "countryId": "US",
    "countryName": "United States",
    "indicatorId": "NY.GDP.MKTP.CD",
    "indicatorName": "GDP (current US$)",
    "year": 2022,
    "value": 25604848907611,
    "unit": null,
    "sourceNote": "Gross domestic product is the total income earned through the production of goods and services in an economic territory during an accounting period...",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-21T22:34:29.663Z",
    "error": null
  }
]

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✨ Why choose this Actor

Feature	Benefit
🌐 Official World Bank API	Data direct from the authoritative source - same as worldbank.org
📊 16,000+ indicators	GDP, population, health, education, environment, and much more
🌍 200+ countries	Full global coverage including regions and income groups
⚡ Fast API-first approach	No browser required - pure fetch, runs in seconds
🔓 No auth required	Fully public API - no API keys or login needed
📅 Historical time series	Up to 10 years of most-recent values per country
🧩 Flexible input	Mix any indicator with any list of countries
💾 4 export formats	CSV, Excel, JSON, XML all available from the dataset

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Method	Speed	Scale	Automation	Cost
This Actor	Seconds	1M+ records	Full	Free tier available
Manual World Bank portal	Minutes per file	Limited	None	Free but slow
Custom script	Fast	Unlimited	Possible	Dev time required
Third-party data APIs	Fast	Varies	Yes	Often paid

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🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account (includes $5 free credit)
2. Find the World Bank Data Scraper in the Apify Store
3. Set your countryCodes (e.g. ["US","CN","DE"]) and indicatorCode (e.g. NY.GDP.MKTP.CD)
4. Optionally set maxItems to limit the run
5. Click Start and wait seconds for the run to complete
6. Download your dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

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💼 Business use cases

📊 Macroeconomic Research

Pull GDP, inflation, and unemployment time series for 50+ countries in one run. Build a multi-decade economic panel dataset that would take days to assemble manually from national statistics offices.

🌱 ESG and Sustainability Reporting

Access CO2 emissions (EN.ATM.CO2E.PC), forest area (AG.LND.FRST.ZS), and renewable energy indicators to benchmark a company's country-level environmental context against industry peers.

🏦 Emerging Market Analysis

Track GDP per capita growth (NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG), FDI inflows (BX.KLT.DINV.WD.GD.ZS), and doing-business indicators for frontier markets. Feed the data into models for country risk scoring.

📰 Data Journalism

Download poverty headcount ratios, literacy rates, or maternal mortality statistics for a breaking story. Get clean, citable, official data in seconds - with source attribution built into every record via sourceNote.

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🔌 Automating World Bank Scraper

Connect this actor to your existing workflows using Make, Zapier, or direct API:

• Make (Integromat): Trigger a run on a schedule, then post the resulting CSV to Google Sheets or Slack
• Zapier: Kick off the actor when a new item appears in a Google Sheet row, download results to Airtable
• Apify API: Call POST /v2/acts/parseforge~world-bank-scraper/runs with your input JSON and poll for completion
• Webhooks: Configure Apify webhooks to notify your endpoint when the dataset is ready
• GitHub Actions: Add a scheduled workflow to refresh your data warehouse weekly

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

🎓 Academic Research

Replicate published cross-country studies, build instrumental variables datasets, or assemble control variables for regression models using the exact World Bank data cited in thousands of peer-reviewed papers.

🧑‍💻 Developer Experiments

Prototype a world heatmap visualization, build a country comparison API, or train a time-series forecasting model - all seeded with authoritative global data in minutes.

🤲 Non-Profit and Humanitarian Work

Track progress on UNICEF targets, SDG commitments, or USAID program outcomes using the same indicators governments and international bodies report on.

🧪 Data Science Education

Introduce students to real-world structured data: clean, well-documented, multi-dimensional, and available with one click - perfect for teaching pandas, R, or SQL.

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

You can ask an AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to help you use this actor. Try prompts like:

• "What World Bank indicator code should I use to get unemployment rate data?"
• "Write me a Python script to call the Apify API and run ParseForge/world-bank-scraper with input for 10 countries"
• "How do I join World Bank scraper output with IMF data in pandas?"
• "What's the best way to visualize GDP per capita trends from World Bank data?"

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🤔 Do I need an API key or account to use this? No. The World Bank REST API is fully public. This actor uses it directly with no authentication. You only need an Apify account to run the actor.

📊 How many indicators are available? Over 16,000 indicators spanning economics, health, education, environment, infrastructure, trade, finance, and more. Browse them at data.worldbank.org/indicator.

🌍 Which countries are supported? All 200+ World Bank member countries and territories, plus regional and income-group aggregates (e.g. 1W for World, OEC for OECD members). Use standard ISO 2-letter codes.

📅 How far back does the data go? The mrv=10 parameter returns up to 10 most-recent values. For longer historical series, you can adjust by modifying the actor or running multiple times. Many indicators go back to 1960.

💹 What does a null value mean? The World Bank doesn't have data for every country-year combination. A null value means the World Bank did not report that data point - it is not a scraping error.

⚡ How fast is a typical run? For 5 countries and one indicator, expect under 5 seconds. For 50 countries, under 30 seconds. The World Bank API is fast and reliable.

🔄 How often is the data updated? World Bank updates its indicators annually, typically between April and October. The actor always fetches the latest available data in real time.

💰 How much does it cost to run? Free users get 10 items per run as a preview. Paid users get up to 1,000,000 items. Create a free account with $5 credit to get started.

📋 What export formats are available? Your dataset is available as JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), and XML directly from the Apify console. No additional tools required.

🔗 Can I run this on a schedule? Yes. Use Apify's built-in scheduling to run the actor daily, weekly, or monthly and keep your dataset fresh automatically.

🧩 Can I scrape multiple indicators at once? The current version fetches one indicator across multiple countries per run. Run the actor once per indicator, or use Apify's API to trigger parallel runs.

📝 Where does sourceNote come from? The sourceNote field is the World Bank's own methodology description for the indicator, fetched from the indicator metadata endpoint. It documents data sources, calculation methods, and caveats.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

Connect your World Bank dataset to:

Spreadsheets: Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, BigQuery BI Tools: Tableau, Power BI, Metabase, Looker Automation: Make (Integromat), Zapier, n8n, Pipedream Data Science: Python (pandas, numpy), R, Jupyter Notebooks Storage: AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob APIs: REST endpoints, GraphQL, webhooks Messaging: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord

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Disclaimer: This actor uses the World Bank's official public REST API at api.worldbank.org. All data is sourced directly from the World Bank Open Data platform and is subject to the World Bank Terms of Use. ParseForge is not affiliated with the World Bank Group.