In this post I’ll show you a Google Data Studio dashboard I built for Comparing Canada and South Africa using World Development Indicators from the World Bank.

I’ve been looking at some different ways of making comparisons between South Africa (where I’m from) and Canada (where I’m currently living).

This Google Data Studio dashboard shows various World Development Indicators from the World Bank.

The Data Source

This data is based on the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

According to the World Bank:
“The World Development Indicators is a compilation of relevant, high-quality, and internationally comparable statistics about global development and the fight against poverty. The database contains 1,600 time series indicators for 217 economies and more than 40 country groups, with data for many indicators going back more than 50 years.”

All of the World Development Indicators (WDI) are available through the WDI public dataset in Google BiQuery.

The country_summary table gives access to the following fields of data shown below. It is accessed using the BigQuery connector.

I’ve setup filters to only look at South Africa and Canada’s data source.

Using the Dashboard

You can select any one of the 1203 metrics to get a time series chart showing the changes over time for the two countries, and a bar chart.

The chart below shows GDP per capita (current US$). The timeline shows the trend over time. The bar chart on the right shows the average for 2017, 2018 and 2019.

The reason for this is that the most indicators only have data available for 2017 or 2018. Therefore in order to ensure the dashboard works for as many indicators as possible the value is the average of the past three years.

I hope you liked this post and found the dashboard for Comparing Canada and South Africa using World Development Indicators interesting.

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