World development indicators, in one paragraph

world-indicators in one paragraph, for anyone deciding whether it is worth downloading.

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: Rebuild the famous bubble chart: GDP per capita against life expectancy, sized by population. 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.

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.