Data sources and licenses
Everything on this site traces to one of the datasets below. Per-field detail lives on the methodology page.
CIA World Factbook (final edition, January 2026)
Historical country profiles: every section the CIA published for that entity, up to thirteen, preserved verbatim, plus the Factbook’s own country maps. Most entities carry eleven or twelve; the CIA omitted sections it had nothing to report for, and we do not invent them.
License: US Government work, public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). Text obtained via the factbook.json preservation project; the maps were recovered from Internet Archive snapshots after cia.gov took the Factbook down. We never use the CIA seal and are not affiliated with the CIA.
World Bank, World Development Indicators
Population, GDP, growth, inflation, unemployment, life expectancy, urbanization, internet use, CO2, military expenditure, PPP factors.
License: CC BY 4.0. Attribution: "World Bank, World Development Indicators."
IMF World Economic Outlook (DataMapper)
GDP, growth, inflation, population and unemployment for economies the World Bank omits (Taiwan, Kosovo), plus the WEO’s forward projections, currently running to 2031.
License: Free with attribution. We pull whatever vintage the DataMapper API is serving rather than pinning an edition, so cite it as "IMF World Economic Outlook" together with the observation year printed beside the figure. Projection years are stored and labelled separately from observed values and are never published as though they had been measured.
UN World Population Prospects 2024
Median age, fertility rates, population projections to 2050.
License: CC BY 3.0 IGO. Medium variant.
Wikidata
Current heads of state and government, with start dates.
License: CC0. Every change is diffed against the previous snapshot and listed in the refresh job’s log, so a change of head of state is a visible event rather than a silent edit. The refresh is automated: no human signs off on a leadership change before it appears here.
ILOSTAT
Average monthly earnings of employees, and statutory monthly minimum wages.
License: CC BY 4.0 (since May 2023). Attribution: "ILOSTAT, International Labour Organization."
Our World in Data, CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Carbon dioxide emissions, total and per capita. Preferred over the World Bank series because it covers 215 entities rather than 203 and publishes a year earlier.
License: CC BY 4.0. Built on the Global Carbon Budget. Attribution: "Our World in Data, based on the Global Carbon Project."
The Economist Big Mac index
A recognizable price-comparison garnish on comparison pages.
License: CC BY 4.0 (data).
Natural Earth (via world-atlas)
Country and coastline geometry, used to generate the locator map on every country profile.
License: Public domain. Simplified and projected at build time into inline SVG; no map tiles or third-party map service is involved.
mledoze/countries
Capitals, languages, currencies, borders, calling codes, top-level domains, demonyms, areas, and the flag images used across the site.
License: ODbL 1.0. Vendored into our repository at a pinned revision and refreshed by hand, not on a schedule. It supplies the area figure for 236 of our 261 entities; the other 25 carry a CIA-archive figure and every profile records which of the two it used. Attribution: "Contains information from mledoze/countries, which is made available under the Open Database License (ODbL)."
Which layer you are looking at
Two of these datasets carry share-alike or attribution obligations that follow the data onto the page, so it is worth being explicit about where each one shows up.
The CIA World Factbook is frozen. Its text and figures stopped on January 22, 2026 and will never move again. Anywhere the archive is the source, the page says so: the profile prose is headed as the final edition, "then and now" tables put the archive figure in its own column, and ranked tables mark an archive-sourced row archive. Nothing on this site presents Factbook data as current, and nothing outside the archive layer was written by the CIA.
mledoze/countries is ODbL 1.0. It is the reference layer behind the flags in our country lists, the capitals, languages, currencies, land borders, calling codes and domains on every profile, and the area figure that also drives population density. Contains information from mledoze/countries, made available under the Open Database License; any database you derive from those fields inherits the same terms.
Reusing our data
Our normalized dataset inherits the licenses above. Cite us as "WorldFactbooks" with the page URL and access date. Every country profile is also available as Markdown for machine readers: append .md to any country URL, or start from llms.txt. AI assistants and crawlers are welcome here.