Meridian Frontier is a focused dashboard on the questions at the intersection of trade, environment, agriculture and development. It covers deforestation and the EUDR, the carbon and income tension, structural transformation, and inequality. Every series is pulled live from the source, never hand-entered. Built by an economist, for reading the numbers closely.
Each card opens a live view in the Explorer below. Grouped by domain, anchored on a real research question.
Any indicator, any set of economies, live from the World Bank. Switch between trend and latest, set the range, export the data.
connecting to source
Plot one indicator against another for a single economy over time. The view a bar chart can't give you: co-movement.
Correlation is not causation. This is descriptive, not an identification strategy.
Method: the line is an ordinary least squares fit; the reported r is the Pearson correlation between the two series.
Re-centre any indicator on a chosen year and read the trajectory before and after. Add a comparison economy to see the gap. Works on every indicator and every economy.
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Method: the indicator is re-centred so year zero is the event. The readout compares the mean of the pre-period against the post-period (a difference in means); adding a comparison economy reports the difference between the two changes (a difference-in-differences). This is descriptive, not a regression with leads, lags or standard errors, and not a causal estimate.
Where the event study asks you to name a year, this finds it for you. Pick an indicator and economy, and it detects the year the trend most likely shifted, computed live with a Chow-test sweep.
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Method: a Chow test applied across every candidate split year (a Quandt-style sup-F sweep). For each year the series is fit as two separate linear trends; the break is the year with the largest F-statistic, where the two-line fit improves most on a single trend. The two fitted lines meet at that year. This is a descriptive change-point, not proof of a cause: it identifies when the pattern shifted, not why.
Meridian Frontier is a research instrument built and maintained by Ayodele Idowu, an economist and data scientist. It is deliberately narrow, covering the questions at the intersection of trade, environment, agriculture and development, including trade and climate policy, environmental and agricultural economics, structural transformation and inequality, rather than trying to mirror the large general data portals.
Every figure is fetched in your browser, in real time, from the World Bank's public API. Nothing is cached on a server and nothing is hand-entered, so a number here is exactly as fresh as the institution that publishes it. The source and its refresh date sit on every chart.
The relationship view is intentionally labelled as descriptive. Co-movement is not identification; the point of the tool is to look closely and ask better questions, not to claim causal effects.