For the first time in its almost half a century of existence, the 2021 publication of the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics (IDS)
added an additional dimension to the data – the creditor country. You can now see the public and publicly guaranteed sector debt of
low- and middle-income countries owed to each creditor country, either official (multilateral or bilateral) or non-official
(private creditor and bondholders), providing more detailed information on the borrower-lender relationship.
To help you start exploring this data, we put together another step-by-step guide in both Python and R. The guide showcases the new “counterpart area” dimension, showing how it is appears in the World Bank API and how to query it.