World Economic Outlook Database, October 2017

World Economic Outlook

Source details

The World Economic Outlook (WEO) database is created during the biannual World Economic Outlook exercise and contains selected macroeconomic data series from the statistical appendix of the WEO report.
The WEO report presents IMF staff analysis and projections of economic developments at the global level, in major country groups, and for many individual countries.
The WEO is released in April and September/October each year.
Use of the database: find data on national accounts, inflation, unemployment rates, balance of payments, fiscal indicators, trade for countries and country groups (aggregates), and commodity prices as reported by the IMF.

Data coverage: available from 1980 to the present.
Projections: given for the next two years; medium-term projections available for selected indicators.
Data completeness: for some countries, data are incomplete or unavailable for certain years.
The WEO database is available in SDMX format from the Entire Dataset page; for more information about SDMX, see SDMX.org.

Somalia:
- Data for Somalia have been added.
- The database now covers a total of 193 countries.
- Somalia is included in the emerging market and developing economies group composites.
- Somalia is classified as a member of the Middle East and North Africa region.
New series:
- Gross Domestic Product per Capita, constant prices (purchasing power parity; 2011 international dollars) have been added to the online database.
Debt series revisions:
- The October 2017 WEO database includes revisions to net and gross debt series for a number of countries.
- Revisions result from work to better align assets and liabilities included in calculations of net debt with the definition of net debt in the IMF GFS Manual 2014 (GFSM 2014).
- Specific adjustments described:
- For a number of countries, changes to the financial assets included in the calculation were made.
- Where net debt increased, this was typically due to the previous inclusion of equity assets in net debt (examples given: Norway, Finland, Netherlands and Sweden), which have now been excluded.
- In some cases insufficient assets were being included (example given: Korea), and once additional financial assets were included this reduced net debt.