About Lewis

Lewis is an international-economics analysis platform that brings together three usually separate views of the world economy — the balance of payments, the flow of funds / international investment position, and cross-border transfers of value — into one explorable, downloadable whole. It integrates more than 100,000 observations spanning roughly eight decades (1945–2024) across official sources.

The platform is named in the tradition of W. Arthur Lewis (1915–1991), the Nobel laureate whose dual-sector model and work on the terms of trade between rich and poor regions sit at the intersection of development and international economics that this site explores.^[1]

The website is built with FastAPI, server-side Plotly, and a Parquet cache — Python only, no build step, no runtime CDN dependency, fully self-hostable. The code and the data construction are designed to be reproducible from public sources; see the methodology for details and the data catalog to download anything you see.

This is part of the Arcanum research workspace. Originally a Python replication of two graduate data-science projects (Advanced Political Economy and International Trade), it has grown into a unified platform.

1. W. Arthur Lewis (1954). Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour. The Manchester School.