The World Bank's World Development Indicators provides direct access to more than 700 development indicators, with time series for 208 countries and 18 country groups from 1960 to present.
A subset of these data can be viewed graphically within the World Bank's <a href="http://devdata.worldbank.org/DataVisualizer/">Data Visualizer</A>.<P> Also, check out <a href=" http://www.worldbank.org/data/onlinedatabases/onlinedatabases.html">the World Banks new open-data initiative</A>.