Frequency of spatial adjectives in the World Development Reports (1978-2021)
Date: 18 June 2025
Data source: World Development Reports
Funding: Part of a European Research Council (ERC)-grant, ECOINT, Grant No 885285
Spatial adjectives such as global, international, regional, or local shape how we perceive the scope, scale, and legitimacy of economic and political issues. This chart displays the normalised frequency of nine spatial adjectives in the World Development Reports (1978-2021), offering insights into shifting framings of development over time. The adjective frequencies were extracted using a Python script applied to the main text of each World Development Report; for instance, the TOC, description of graphs and tables, footnotes, appendices, text boxes and bibliographies were not considered. To avoid counting adjectives that appear as part of institutional or proper names (e.g. international in International Criminal Court), capitalized words at sentence-initial position were excluded. The final dataset includes only adjectives that appear in lowercase form within sentence bodies. Word frequencies were normalized per million words to enable comparability across reports of different lengths.
Data source: World Development Reports
Funding: Part of a European Research Council (ERC)-grant, ECOINT, Grant No 885285
Spatial adjectives such as global, international, regional, or local shape how we perceive the scope, scale, and legitimacy of economic and political issues. This chart displays the normalised frequency of nine spatial adjectives in the World Development Reports (1978-2021), offering insights into shifting framings of development over time. The adjective frequencies were extracted using a Python script applied to the main text of each World Development Report; for instance, the TOC, description of graphs and tables, footnotes, appendices, text boxes and bibliographies were not considered. To avoid counting adjectives that appear as part of institutional or proper names (e.g. international in International Criminal Court), capitalized words at sentence-initial position were excluded. The final dataset includes only adjectives that appear in lowercase form within sentence bodies. Word frequencies were normalized per million words to enable comparability across reports of different lengths.
- Each bar represents a single year.
- Details, such as raw frequency, are available via tooltips.
- The bars can be ordered chronologically or by frequency.