Economic Failure Panel: 60 Countries, 1970-2024

A country-by-year panel covering 60 countries, 1970–2024, built to study why economies fail. Countries are tagged by failure mode and a companion table dates the individual crisis episodes, so macro indicators can be aligned to the moment things broke. The panel deliberately includes countries that did not fail. Without a comparison group it is impossible to separate a cause of collapse from an ordinary feature of a developing economy. Country groups sovereign default / debt crisis: 14 countries hyperinflation / currency collapse: 7 countries banking or financial crisis: 9 countries resource curse / commodity bust: 6 countries stagnation or slow decline: 7 countries comparators that avoided or recovered from failure: 17 countries Contents panel_wide.csv — one row per country-year, one column per indicator panel_long.csv — tidy long form carrying a source identifier per observation variables_dictionary.csv — definition, unit, upstream code and coverage for every column crisis_episodes.csv — curated failure episodes with dates, types and resolution country_metadata.csv — ISO3, failure-group tag, region, income group Coverage National accounts; fiscal revenue, expenditure and balances; government and external debt; money, prices and interest rates; exchange rates and reserves; trade aggregates and composition; demographic structure; labour and human capital; productivity; defence spending; credit and banking health; governance; inequality; energy and resource rents. Sources World Development Indicators (World Bank) — https://api.worldbank.org/v2 Worldwide Governance Indicators (World Bank) — https://api.worldbank.org/v2 International Debt Statistics (World Bank) — https://api.worldbank.org/v2 Caveats Crisis episode dates are curated and flagged dates_verified=FALSE pending reconciliation against Laeven & Valencia and the BoC–BoE default database. Missing data is left missing, never interpolated. Sparseness in crisis countries is itself informative: collapsing states stop publishing statistics. Known integrity breaks: Argentine CPI 2007–2015, Venezuelan data after 2015, Zimbabwean currency redenominations, Greek fiscal revisions in 2004 and 2009. Derived from World Bank data licensed CC BY 4.0; this compilation is released under the same licence.