⚽Macro Copa

A dashboard to compare macroeconomic indicators of the 2022 World Cup countries.

ShinyApp link: https://schoulten.shinyapps.io/macrocopa/

Index

• About
• Data
• Technical details
• Installation/replication
• Next steps

About

This dashboard is an intersection between economics and soccer, taking advantage of the 2022 World Cup event as its theme. The main idea of the dashboard is to allow the user to quickly compare the economic performance of two participating countries in the competition.

Key features:

• Interactive charts;
• Button to select pairs of countries for comparison;
• Button to select macroeconomic variables for comparison (GDP, inflation rate, interest rate, unemployment rate, exchange rate);
• Button for interactive time filter;
• Button to select chart type (line, column, or area);
• Button for data download.

Data

The data comes from the World Bank, using the World Development Indicators (WDI) dataset, and is described below:

Variable	Description	Source
GDP	Annual growth, %	World Bank (WDI)
Unemployment	Total, % of total labor force, national estimate, annual	World Bank (WDI)
Inflation	Consumer prices, %, annual	World Bank (WDI)
Interest rate	Deposit, %, annual	World Bank (WDI)
Exchange rate	Official, LCU per US$, period average, annual	World Bank (WDI)

Technical details

This project was built using several technologies and the development process is summarized in the flowchart below.

flowchart LR
    subgraph ETL
        direction TB
        DBnomics-->dplyr-->CSV
    end
    subgraph Development
        direction LR
        CSS-->Flexdashboard
        JavaScript-->Highcharts
        subgraph R
        direction LR
        Tidyverse-->Highcharts
        Tidyverse-->Flexdashboard
        Highcharts-->Shiny
        Flexdashboard-->Shiny
        end
    end
    subgraph Deploy
        direction LR
        output[Shinyapps.io]
    end
    ETL-->Development-->Deploy

Loading

• ETL: to extract, transform, and load the data, we used the DBnomics database, which provides a data API for various sources, including World Bank. The process was developed using the R language, and a CSV file with the data was generated at the end.

• Dashboard development: we used Flexdashboard and Shiny together to structure the HTML page with a template and add interactivity and buttons to the dashboard, using CSS and JS when necessary for customization. Additional data manipulations were made with Tidyverse, and the graphics were generated with Highcharts.

• Deploy: to publish the dashboard, we used the Shinyapps.io service from Posit.

Finally, we used renv for project dependency (package) management, and all the tools used are open source and free.

Installation/replication

To replicate this ShinyApp, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository (terminal):

git clone https://github.com/schoulten/macrocopa.git

2. Open the RStudio project (macrocopa.Rproj file).

3. Restore the project dependencies (R Console):

renv::restore()

4. Run the ShinyApp locally (R Console):

rmarkdown::run()

You should obtain a screen similar to this as a result:

Next steps

• Fix CSS for country titles (H1 element)
• Add GitHub Action to automate ETL and deploy
• Refactor for more functional code
• Optimize for mobile interfaces