Sources & methodology

Trust begins with showing the seams.

Where the numbers come from, how they are transformed, what is missing, and what we still do not know.

Schemav1.0.0
SnapshotAug 5, 2026
Coverage10 indicators · 8 geographies
StateCached authoritative data
01

Current data source

World Bank World Development Indicators

The first milestone uses World Development Indicators source 2 through the official v2 Indicators API. No API key is required. Requests cover 2014 through 2025 and the product keeps the reporting period attached to every observation.

License
CC BY 4.0 for World Bank produced open datasets; underlying provider terms can vary by series
Attribution
World Bank, World Development Indicators
Refresh policy
Manual build time ingestion in this milestone; no scheduled production job is active.
Rate limit
No numeric limit published in the reviewed API documentation.
Revisions
Recent values may be revised. The selected response does not provide observation level vintage flags, so the UI says “not provided.”
02

Normalization

One contract for web and iOS

The ingestion step converts upstream rows into a versioned JSON snapshot. The web API and the bundled iOS offline fallback both consume that same file. Calculations such as absolute and percentage change happen once during ingestion.

  1. 1Fetch selected WDI series by ISO 3166 1 alpha 3 geography
  2. 2Remove only null or nonnumeric observations
  3. 3Sort periods and calculate comparable adjacent period changes
  4. 4Attach source, retrieval, adjustment, observation type, and freshness fields
  5. 5Expose the exact snapshot to both clients
03

Unavailable and stale data

Missing stays missing

4 of 80 country and indicator combinations returned no comparable observation. They remain unavailable rather than falling back to a different definition.

government-debt · WLDgovernment-debt · CHNgovernment-debt · DEUgovernment-debt · JPN

Annual observations more than two reporting years behind the snapshot year are labeled older. A successful retrieval does not make an older reporting period current.

04

Privacy and security

No account required

This milestone does not implement authentication, payments, newsletters, notifications, or server side personal profiles. Browser preferences stay on the device. Advertising requests remain disabled until valid account configuration and regional consent messaging are ready.

The web response adds a restrictive referrer policy, content type protection, frame protection, permissions policy, and a same origin resource policy. The dedicated privacy notice explains hosting, browser storage, advertising, and visitor choices.

Read the privacy notice →

05

Editorial and funding

Context without conclusions for sale

The product provides general educational information, not individualized financial or investment advice. It does not label economic movements universally good or bad and does not infer the cause of the latest movement without evidence.

No sponsor, affiliate, or donor is active. Advertising infrastructure is limited to selected content pages and remains inactive until configured. Commercial relationships must be labeled and may not influence data selection or interpretation. Primary public information and core education remain outside a general paywall.

Read the advertising policy →