The World Development Report (WDR) is the annual flagship publication of the World Bank. The WDR was initiated by World Bank Group President Robert S. McNamara and launched in 1978. For McNamara development was 'complex and exacting' (McNamara, Robert S. (1977) 'Address to the Board of Governors' 26 September, Washington, DC.1977, p. 36) and he believed that a central challenge in achieving development was a lack of relevant knowledge. The WDR was conceived to fill this gap as "an ongoing assessment of development problems. The objective will be to improve the Bank's own understanding of the principal components of the development process and their complex interrelationships, and thus gradually develop a framework that can better assist our member countries to deal with that process more effectively" (ibid., p. 33). 

On this Workbench #2 we share descriptive statistics regarding the use of various linguistic signs in the WDRs 1978-2021. Our corpus contained the main text of the Reports, including 'text boxes', 'spotlights' and 'definitions', but excluding ToCs, acknowledgments, bibliographies, references, and appendices. The global corpus of the WDRs 1978-2021 contains ~4.4 million words. If not otherwise stated, we normalised word frequencies by 1,000,000 words.

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This Workbench feeds into the ECOINT-project that studies the symbolic construction of 'economic problems' (led by Sabine Selchow). 

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