Field note · September 16, 2026

An exercise on world-indicators

A tidy panel of thirty countries over twenty-four years with GDP per capita, life expectancy, population, CO₂ and internet penetration — small enough to hold in your head, rich enough for real modelling..

1 min read ·Data quality ·quality practice

An exercise worth doing on world-indicators.

720 rows, 9 columns, one row per country per year. A tidy panel of thirty countries over twenty-four years with GDP per capita, life expectancy, population, CO₂ and internet penetration — small enough to hold in your head, rich enough for real modelling.

Every dataset here is synthetic, which is a deliberate trade. It costs realism and buys three things: we can ship it CC0 with no licence trap, we can bake in the exact quirk a lesson needs, and nobody's real records end up in a tutorial.

Something to try: Fit a country fixed-effects model and compare it with the pooled one. The SQL playground has it loaded already, and the data explorer will profile every column in one pass if you would rather look before you query.

sql
select *
from world_indicators
limit 20;

The file is generated from a fixed seed, so the CSV you download today is byte-identical to the one from last year. That matters more than it sounds: it means a lesson can say "row 412 is the interesting one" and still be right in eighteen months.

Download it, break it, keep it. CC0 — no attribution required, no account, no email.