World Bank Indicators Scraper — GDP, Population & More

What this Actor scrapes

The World Bank's Open Data API is free and keyless, but its wire format is built for the World Bank's own tooling, not for a spreadsheet. A successful response is a two-element array — pagination metadata bolted onto a row list, not a normal JSON object — and an invalid indicator code answers with HTTP 200 and a silent error block instead of a 404. This Actor fetches any mix of indicator codes across any countries and any date range, and hands back one flat row per country/indicator/year — ready for a pivot table, not a parser rewrite.

What we handle for you

• We parse the API's two-shape response envelope so a paging bug or a bad indicator code never corrupts your dataset.
• We skip an invalid indicator code or an empty country series with a clear warning — one bad code never kills the rest of your run.
• We retry 429/5xx responses with exponential backoff and honour Retry-After.
• We keep every null observation — most (country, year) pairs genuinely have no reported value, and we ship that as a real null, not a dropped row.

Use cases

• Build a "GDP + population + CO2 for 200 countries × 25 years" master table for a macro research note.
• Pull a development-finance dashboard's underlying indicators without hand-copying from the World Bank's website.
• Feed an ESG or country-risk model with the World Bank's own reported figures, refreshed on a schedule.
• Fact-check a journalism piece against the official series instead of a secondary aggregator.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "indicatorCodes": [
    "NY.GDP.MKTP.CD",
    "SP.POP.TOTL"
  ],
  "countryCodes": "US;CN;DE",
  "dateRange": "2015:2024",
  "includeSourceNote": false,
  "maxResults": 200,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

country_idcountry_nameindicator_idindicator_nameyearvalueunit

{
  "country_id": "USA",
  "country_iso3": "USA",
  "country_name": "United States",
  "region": null,
  "income_level": null,
  "indicator_id": "NY.GDP.MKTP.CD",
  "indicator_name": "GDP (current US$)",
  "year": 2022,
  "value": 25462700000000.0,
  "unit": "",
  "obs_status": "",
  "decimal": 0,
  "scale": null,
  "source_note": null,
  "source_organization": null
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• region and income_level are not enriched from the country-metadata endpoint in this version — both ship as null. A future version will cross-reference /v2/country to fill them in.
• This is a current snapshot, not a historical-revision tracker — the World Bank periodically restates past years, and we fetch whatever the API reports at run time.
• We pass through the API's raw value and unit as-is — no currency conversion or unit normalization.