World Development Indicators 2015

World Development Indicators (WDI) publication is a collection of time-series data for 214 economies, with many indicators going back more than 50 years. WDI provides cross-country comparable statistics about development and people’s lives around the globe. It is divided into six sections -- World View, People, Environment, Economy, States and Markets, and Global Links. New online tables, previously published in the book, are now available from wdi.worldbank.org/tables and they provide data from the most up-to-date database.

The year 2015 is when the world aimed to achieve many of the targets set out in the Millennium Development Goals. Some have been met. The rate of extreme poverty and the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water were both halved between 1990 and 2010, five years ahead of schedule. But some targets have not been achieved, and the aggregates used to measure global trends can mask the uneven progress in some regions and countries. This edition of World Development Indicators uses the latest available data and forecasts to show whether the goals have been achieved and highlights some of the differences between countries and regions that underlie the trends.