Sisyphus

Summary

Sisyphus is the long-run growth and macro persistence observatory: a curated World Bank WDI warehouse with 59 annual series across roughly 195 economies from 1960 to 2025. The platform pairs deterministic ingestion with a read-only analytics API, exposing persistence diagnostics, shock features, and panel extraction for cross-country modeling. It is intentionally narrow, optimizing for stable long-horizon coverage and reproducibility over breadth.

What it is

Sisyphus is a small, opinionated slice of the World Bank Development Indicators focused on long-run macro, growth, trade, fiscal, finance, labor, demographic, and external sector indicators. Two collector packs, wb_wdi_longrun (45 series) and wb_wdi_external (14 series), pull annual data for all available economies from the World Bank v2 API on a staggered weekly schedule, with paced requests, exponential backoff, and an append-only collection log that records freshness and row counts for every run.

The service exposes a FastAPI plus SQLite warehouse with stable series codes, idempotent country and source registries, and machine-first JSON contracts. Beyond raw observation queries, the API delivers derived analytics: per-series summary statistics, AR(1) persistence with implied half-life, year-over-year and log-difference growth, rolling volatility, growth z-scores, shock and contraction flags, and cross-country comparator rankings sorted by persistence and volatility. A panel route assembles long-format multi-series extracts ready for econometric work, with built-in balancedness diagnostics that count distinct country-year cells meeting a minimum series threshold. Admin endpoints surface freshness, sparse coverage, and quality flags for operators. The system is the macro counterpart to Hercules and shares schema conventions so that analytical tooling and SQL assumptions transfer cleanly across the two observatories.

Methodology

• Two curated collector packs: wb_wdi_longrun with 45 indicators covering growth, levels, demographics, investment, trade, prices, fiscal, finance, productivity, human capital, environment, technology, and structural value-added shares.
• wb_wdi_external pack with 14 indicators covering FDI flows, current account, reserves, external debt, short-term debt, and BoP goods and services trade.
• Annual frequency from 1960 to 2025, with World Bank v2 API pulls paced at 0.45 seconds between indicators and exponential backoff on transient HTTP failures.
• Persistence diagnostics per country and series: AR(1) coefficient, implied half-life in years, sample mean and standard deviation, average and maximum absolute change, and jump-to-volatility ratio.
• Shock features: year-over-year growth, log-difference growth, rolling volatility (configurable window), growth z-scores, shock flag at absolute z above 2, and contraction flag on negative growth.
• Cross-country comparators rank economies for any series by AR(1) persistence and secondary volatility, with minimum-observation gating to control panel quality.
• Panel extractor returns long-format frames for up to 30 series with country and year filters, plus balancedness counts and ratios for distinct country-year cells.
• Five-table SQLite warehouse (sources, series, observations, countries, collection_log) with WAL mode, idempotent seeds, and uniqueness on series, country, year, month.

Data sources

• World Bank WDI: NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG, NY.GDP.PCAP.KD, NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.KD, NY.GNP.PCAP.CD (growth and income levels)
• World Bank WDI: SP.POP.TOTL, SP.POP.GROW, SP.POP.1564.TO.ZS, SP.POP.DPND, SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS (demographics)
• World Bank WDI: NE.GDI.TOTL.ZS, NY.GDS.TOTL.ZS, NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS, NE.IMP.GNFS.ZS, FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG (investment, trade, prices)
• World Bank WDI: SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS, SL.TLF.CACT.ZS, SL.GDP.PCAP.EM.KD, SE.TER.ENRR, SP.DYN.LE00.IN, SH.DYN.MORT (labor, human capital)
• World Bank WDI: GC.DOD.TOTL.GD.ZS, GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS, FM.LBL.BMNY.GD.ZS, FD.AST.PRVT.GD.ZS, FR.INR.RINR (fiscal and finance)
• World Bank WDI: BX.KLT.DINV.WD.GD.ZS, BM.KLT.DINV.WD.GD.ZS, BX.KLT.DINV.CD.WD, BM.KLT.DINV.CD.WD (FDI flows)
• World Bank WDI: FI.RES.TOTL.CD, FI.RES.TOTL.MO, DT.DOD.DECT.GN.ZS, BN.CAB.XOKA.CD (reserves, external debt, current account)
• World Bank WDI: NV.AGR.TOTL.ZS, NV.IND.TOTL.ZS, NV.SRV.TOTL.ZS, EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE, IT.NET.USER.ZS, GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS (structure, environment, technology, R&D)

Deliverables when used in engagements

• Read-only JSON API for series queries, country topic coverage, and 30-series panel extracts with balancedness diagnostics.
• Persistence and shock-feature endpoints (AR(1), half-life, volatility, z-score shocks) for cross-country comparison.
• Cross-country comparator rankings by persistence and volatility for any indicator in the catalog.
• Operator admin surface: freshness tracking, run history, quality diagnostics for sparse series-country pairs.
• Reproducible CLI workflow (init-db, collect, status, serve) with full collection logs and per-source last-fetched timestamps.