Cross-National Panel of Economic, Demographic, and Investment Indicators: Normalized Tables Derived from World Bank WDI and UN World Population Prospects (DATA 6200, Spring 2026)

This deposit provides a normalized, relational representation of country-level economic, demographic, and investment-related measures suitable for teaching and research in data management, longitudinal analysis, and international development.

The database integrates two authoritative public sources. Macroeconomic and investment-style series are derived from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) and related World Bank country metadata, which supply comparable cross-country time series with documented definitions and units. Demographic series are derived from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Population Prospects (WPP), which provides internationally harmonized demographic estimates and projections by location and time period. By separating reference data (countries, indicators, and extract provenance) from long-format observations, the schema avoids redundant storage of labels and units, supports referential integrity, and makes it straightforward to append new years or indicators without restructuring tables.

The normalized logical model emphasizes third normal form (3NF): each non-key attribute depends only on the key of its table, and repeating groups (for example, one column per year in a spreadsheet) are unpivoted into atomic rows keyed by country, indicator, and year. A single fact-style observation table stores numeric values with foreign keys to country and indicator dictionaries, while a data extract table records when files were downloaded and from which URLs, supporting reproducibility and auditability. Optional views can present wide “panel” layouts (one row per country-year) for common indicator bundles such as GDP, inflation, unemployment, and current account balance, alongside demographic measures such as total population, population growth, median age, and life expectancy, and investment-related measures such as government education expenditure, current health expenditure, foreign direct investment, and gross fixed capital formation.

The dataset is intended for coursework scenarios including SQL querying, integrity constraint design, ETL from CSV, and documentation of data lineage. Users should verify indicator definitions against the original provider documentation before drawing substantive scientific conclusions, because revisions to official series and boundary changes can affect historical values. All intellectual property rights in the underlying statistics remain with their respective publishers; this deposit documents the transformation and organization applied to create a reproducible, normalized derivative suited to database systems coursework.