The same indicator, the same year, from several releases of the World Development Indicators side by side. Revisions between releases of one database are large enough to change cross-country results (Johnson, Larson, Papageorgiou & Subramanian 2013 show this for growth rates), and they are easy to miss because a figure looks the same whichever release it came from. This makes the check one call.
Arguments
- indicator
One WDI indicator code, optionally named.
- vintages
Two or more releases, as in
wdi_vintages()("2019-07"), or"current"for the live release.- year
The year to compare.
NULL(default) uses the most recent year every release has values for.- countries
Optional
iso3cvector to restrict the comparison to.
Value
A tibble, one row per country and release: iso3c, country,
vintage, value, and the revision and rel_revision from the first
release listed. A summary per release – the number of countries in both,
the median absolute and absolute relative revision, and the shares of
countries revised by more than 1% and 10% – is attached as the
"countryatlas_revisions" attribute.
Units change between releases too
A series can be rebased between releases – GDP in constant 2010 US$ in one,
constant 2015 US$ in the next – and then every country is "revised" by the
change of base. The series label of each release is compared, and a change
of unit warns (class countryatlas_unit_mismatch).
References
Johnson, S., Larson, W., Papageorgiou, C. & Subramanian, A. (2013). Is newer better? Penn World Table revisions and their impact on growth estimates. Journal of Monetary Economics 60(2), 255-274. doi:10.1016/j.jmoneco.2012.10.022
Examples
# \donttest{
compare_vintages("SP.POP.TOTL", c("2019-07", "current"), year = 2015)
#> Warning: Release "2019-07" does not hold "SP.POP.TOTL".
#> ℹ The nearest releases are "2019-06", "2019-09", and "2019-04".
#> Warning: Fewer than two releases returned data, so there is nothing to compare.
#> # A tibble: 0 × 6
#> # ℹ 6 variables: iso3c <chr>, country <chr>, vintage <chr>, value <dbl>,
#> # revision <dbl>, rel_revision <dbl>
# }