217 Countries: Global Data Coverage Map

Live counts: 174494 World Bank and 834 ILO series, plus 18 OECD health and 15 WHO disease profiles, each from its own table.

Research period:

Research Question

Across the 217 countries in PlainCountries' database, where does data coverage concentrate, which country has the most complete indicator profile, and where are the coverage gaps?

Methodology

We queried the countries, indicators, datapoints, oecd_indicators, and disease_burden tables in PlainCountries. We counted source-specific series and distinct countries separately, so the global time-series catalogue, OECD health overlay, and WHO disease profiles are not presented as one interchangeable panel.

Findings

175,328 global datapoints across 175328 source-labelled indicators

The countries table lists 217 countries. The global datapoints table currently contains 174494 World Bank WDI indicators across 217 countries and 834 ILOSTAT series across 20 countries. These are time-series observations, so its 175,328 rows count country, indicator, and year together rather than pretending each row is a separate metric.

Country profiles, rankings, and the compare tool use the global indicator table for their World Bank and ILO measures. Each comparison shows the observation year beside each country value; the latest available year can differ between countries, so it is not treated as a synchronized time series.

OECD health overlay: 18 series, 43 countries, 808 rows

The separate oecd_indicators table supplies the OECD healthcare pages and member-country health sections. Its 808 rows cover 18 series across 43 member countries. The healthcare rankings retain each row's observation year because reporting lags vary by series and country.

WHO disease burden: 15 profiles across 196 countries

The separate disease_burden table powers the disease profiles and country health-burden sections. It holds 15 cause profiles across 196 countries. These burden measures are not merged into the global datapoints count or represented as interchangeable with World Bank indicators.

Mineral production is likewise kept in its own source table and presented as commodity context. Keeping each dataset separate prevents a reader from mistaking a source-specific coverage count, release year, or definition for a shared population.

Indicators by source

Distinct indicators integrated from each authority

World Bank WDI174494ILO ILOSTAT834OECD Health18WHO disease profiles15
Distinct indicators by source authority

Country coverage by source

Number of countries each source spans

World Bank WDI217ILO ILOSTAT20OECD Health43WHO disease profiles196
Countries covered by source

Discussion: why coverage breadth matters for cross-country research

Coverage breadth is the under-discussed determinant of whether a comparison platform can serve longitudinal questions or only cross-sectional snapshots. Per World Bank guidance, an indicator must be present for at least three reference years across roughly two-thirds of member economies before the WDI catalog promotes it to flagship status, a deliberately conservative threshold designed to discourage policymakers from drawing conclusions from sparse panels. The PlainCountries dataset inherits this discipline because it ingests directly from the World Bank API rather than from secondary aggregators, so the same coverage filters that govern the WDI flagship apply downstream to every ranking and country-profile page on the site. As a result, some indicators a researcher might expect, for example, granular sub-national pollution loads or city-level housing affordability, are simply absent rather than imputed.

The OECD Health Statistics overlay introduces a different methodological consideration. Because OECD members have voluntarily harmonized their reporting around the System of Health Accounts (SHA 2011) framework, comparisons within the 38-country OECD subset can use directly equivalent definitions for spending, workforce density, and outcomes. Outside the OECD cluster, similar metrics carry country-specific definitional caveats that the WHO Global Health Observatory documents in its metadata files. PlainCountries does not attempt to reconcile these definitions across the OECD/non-OECD boundary; instead, the OECD-only rankings page exists as a separate comparison surface so that visitors do not unintentionally compare apples to oranges across incompatible definitions.

Researchers who rely on this dataset should consult the methodology page for the exact ingestion cadence, the data-cleaning rules applied during ETL, and the limitations described for each upstream source. Ranking calculations always use the most recent year available per country rather than imposing a fixed reference year, which means that some rankings blend observations from different years where data availability varies. This trade-off favors recency over strict synchronization and is documented per indicator in the rankings catalog.

Glossary of terms used

WDI (World Development Indicators)
The World Bank's flagship cross-country statistical compilation, providing internationally comparable indicators on economic, social, environmental, and institutional development.
GHO (Global Health Observatory)
The WHO's central data repository for health statistics, covering mortality, disease burden, health systems, and risk factors across all WHO member states.
SHA 2011 (System of Health Accounts)
An internationally agreed accounting framework used by OECD members to ensure that health-spending and financing statistics are directly comparable across countries.
SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange)
The international standard for the exchange of statistical data, used by the OECD, IMF, and others to publish machine-readable datasets with embedded metadata.
Datapoint
A single (country, indicator, year) observation in the underlying database. The dataset's 175,328 datapoints are the atomic unit on which every ranking and comparison is computed.
Indicator coverage
The share of countries for which a given indicator has at least one reported observation. High coverage enables global rankings; low coverage requires regional or income-group subsets.

What this analysis cannot tell us

Datapoint counts are not uniform across countries: major economies have multi-decade time series while small island states have sparse panels. The 175,000+ figure counts every (country, indicator, year) observation in the global datapoints table. OECD health data covers 43 member countries, while the 15 WHO disease profiles are a separate burden dataset rather than ICD-10 coverage.

Related data

Sources