Just watch Hans Rosling's fascinating presentation to the State Department last June (below), and you don't have to be a development economist or a public health statistician to see that the World Bank's new open data initiative has great potential. Today, the Bank gave the world unrestricted access to much of its global economic and development data, allowing brighter minds than this one—the Hans Roslings of the world—to peer in with an outside perspective and to mine it for new insight. Rosling himself sent a tweet today hailing the "liberation" of the Bank's statistics and calling for the IMF, OECD and UN agencies to follow suit.

Watch the video below and visit www.gapminder.org to check out the interactive tool you'll see in the presentation.