World Bank via Pandas - looking up country regions

Question

I am getting country data from World Bank via Pandas Remote Data API.

Is there a way to get metadata for each country? In particular:

• Is it a country, or a region/group (e.g. Arab World or Upper Middle Income)?
• If it is a country, to which region does it belong?

Answer 1

You can pull the metadata directly from this URL (xml returned by default):

http://api.worldbank.org/countries

It looks like it has what you need. Regions/groups are treated like countries but you can distinguish them based on empty or "NA" field values.