About
Worldlines
An editorial data app for global development statistics — 217 countries, 85 curated indicators, up to 275 years of coverage, every figure benchmarked against peers, region, income group, and the world. Alongside the usual development metrics it carries a psychological layer: trust, values, beliefs, and happiness, drawn from 667,000 World Values Survey / EVS interviews and the World Happiness Report.
Created by
Worldlines is built and maintained by Vishal Singh.
How it's built
Every page on Worldlines is static. A build step pulls clean parquet files from a data lake, reshapes them with DuckDB, and writes small JSON files under public/data/ — server pages read that JSON straight off disk, and client components fetch the same files over HTTP for on-demand country comparisons. There is no runtime database and no runtime credentials.
Data sources
11 datasets, cross-walked onto one set of country codes and combined at build time.
World Bank — World Development Indicators
1960–2024 · ~1,500 series
The core of the site: GDP, trade, population, health, education, and infrastructure statistics for every country the Bank tracks.
wdi_timeseries_1960_2024.parquet · country_crosssectional_enhanced.parquet
V-Dem — Varieties of Democracy
1789–2025
Expert-coded democracy indices (polyarchy, liberal democracy, and components) with credible intervals, reaching back to the 18th century.
vdem_timeseries.parquet
Quality of Government Institute
1960–2024
A cross-walk of governance measures — Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators, Freedom House, and UNDP's Human Development Index — standardized onto one panel.
governance_timeseries_1960_2024.parquet
Our World in Data
1750–2024
Energy mix and CO₂ emissions series, curated and harmonized by the OWID team from IEA, EIA, and Global Carbon Project data.
owid_timeseries.parquet
World Happiness Report
2011–2025
The annual Cantril ladder life-evaluation panel behind the happiness rankings, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
world_happy_report.parquet
World Values Survey / European Values Study
1981–2023 · 667k respondents · 118 countries
Microdata on beliefs, trust, and values, aggregated at build time into survey-weighted country-year means and demographic (gender / education / age) breakdowns — no individual response ever reaches the client.
wvs_clean.parquet
Pew Research Center
2010 & 2020
Religious composition by country, used for each country's religion breakdown and its Religious Diversity Index.
Religious Composition, 2010–2020
World Inequality Database
1800–present
Top income and wealth shares reconstructed from tax records, household surveys, and national accounts by the World Inequality Lab.
wid_timeseries.parquet
Uppsala Conflict Data Program
1989–present
Georeferenced battle-death event data, aggregated by country, year, and conflict type.
ucdp_conflict_timeseries.parquet
Maddison Project Database
1 CE–2022
Two millennia of GDP-per-capita and population reconstructions from the University of Groningen's Maddison Project.
maddison_timeseries.parquet
Penn World Table
1950–2023 · v11.0
Cross-country productivity measures — human capital, labor share, hours worked, and total factor productivity.
pwt_timeseries.parquet