Computing Facts from the World Bank’s Labor Data

In 2010, our friends at the World Bank opened up their highly regarded World Development Indicators (WDI) database, making hundreds of economics, education, health, and other indicators free to download and explore. As part of our own mission to make data more accessible and comprehensible, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve been steadily adding WDI and other World Bank data to Wolfram|Alpha, so you can answer thousands of new questions about key components of global development.

One of the first sets we tackled was data on labor and employment, which means Wolfram|Alpha can now generate some quite detailed computations and comparisons of employment-related data for most of the world’s countries and territories. Try an input like “fraction of people working in agriculture in US, Russia, and Japan” to see find out how much less agrarian these economies have become over time.

Or try something like “labor force fraction with college education in Europe” to find out which country has the best-educated labor pool in a given region.

Below are examples from the complete list of labor-related core properties you can explore with Wolfram|Alpha right now:

• Labor force
• Employees
• Unemployment
• Long-term unemployment
• Vulnerable employment
• Labor participation rate
• Employment to population ratio
• Child employment
• Youth unemployment

As you try general queries for each of these properties, you’ll also notice that data is also available by sex, industry, education level, age group, or other variables in many cases. So you can try queries like “Egypt, Libya, Tunisia employment to population ratio for ages 15-24” to dig more deeply into the data.

Please note that in this source, data availability can vary wildly among countries and regions. If you don’t specify a year for a particular query, Wolfram|Alpha will compute an answer based on the most recent data available—but we’re actively working to bring in more current data for certain key properties, and we’ll alert you as updates flow into the system.

We’ll highlight more World Bank data in the coming weeks. In the meantime, let us know what you discover and what questions you’d like Wolfram|Alpha to be able to answer next.