Using the world development indicators database for statistical analysis in Stata

The World Bank’s world development indicators (WDI) compilation is a rich and widely used database about the development of most economies in the world. However, after insheeting a WDI dataset, some data management is required prior to performing statistical analysis. In this article, I propose a new Stata command, wdireshape, for automating this data management. While reshaping a WDI dataset into structures amenable to panel data, seeming unrelated regression, or cross-sectional modeling, wdireshape renames the series and places the series descriptors into variable labels. Copyright 2010 by StataCorp LP.