It is still far from <a href="http://www.gapminder.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gapminder.org/</a> (which does an incredible good job at leveraging data using visualization techniques/fancy UI), but at least it's free. Last time I used World Bank data, even for educational purposes, one needed to pay.<p>It's hard for me to see a good reason why data from the UN or the World Bank should not be accessible to everyone.