The database has been moved, and the connection changed accordingly. All users should update the package, older package versions will cease to fetch data in a few months time.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (COD) was added to the East African Community in the am_entities table.
am_pivot_wider() has become faster by internally replacing data.table::dcast() by collapse::pivot().
The database was expanded to include data for all 195 countries (where available), which includes the 193 UN Member States, Western Sahara and Taiwan, to allow comparison with Africa. A new dataset countries_wld was added providing codes for all 195 countries. The default behavior of the package is not changed i.e. if no country codes are supplied, am_data() retrieves data for all African countries.
The package fails gracefully i.e. without error if the database is not available.
A like-named Python package has been made available on PyPi.
A repository for bug reports has been made available on GitHub. The source code remains private though.
am_pivot_wider() supports factor variables as labels and does not check for uniqueness, making it a bit faster.am_pivot_longer() now by default codes series and labels columns as factors, which also yields speed improvements.am_series() table, July 2022am_entities table, May 2022