--- title: "Refinitiv Worldscope: global company fundamentals (licensed)" description: >- Worldscope is Refinitiv (LSEG) global database of standardized company fundamentals (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow, ratios, per-share data) and descriptive information for public companies across many countries. It is licensed: this page documents the access path and the gotchas, but the data was not exercised here. sidebar: label: Worldscope tags: [accounting, international, fundamentals, licensed, data:worldscope] --- :::caution[Licensed: not exercised here] **Worldscope is a paid licensed product** (Refinitiv / LSEG), sometimes reached through [WRDS](/wiki/commercial/wrds/), so it carries **no provenance badge**: the access path below was **not** run in this session (no Refinitiv / LSEG / WRDS credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute's Verified discipline. ::: **Worldscope** is Refinitiv's (LSEG) global database of standardized company fundamentals: balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow items, along with ratios, per-share data, and descriptive information for public companies across many countries, with a long international history. It is one of the two main sources of international company fundamentals, the other being [Compustat Global](/wiki/commercial/compustat-global/). Worldscope is the fundamentals complement to [Datastream](/wiki/commercial/datastream/) (which supplies prices, returns, and market data) and is frequently used together with it. A paper we distill uses it: [Faccio et al.](/wiki/papers/jf/2025/faccio-impediments-schumpeterian-process-replacement-2025/) on impediments to the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction. - **Cost:** licensed, subscription. No free tier. - **Vendor:** Refinitiv / LSEG (lineage traces through Thomson Reuters / Thomson Financial, where the product was the Worldscope database). - **Coverage:** tens of thousands of firms across developed and emerging markets, with annual and interim fundamentals; history reaches into the 1980s, with deeper and broader coverage in later years. ## Access (when licensed) - **Through Datastream or WRDS.** Worldscope fundamentals are typically reached through [Datastream](/wiki/commercial/datastream/), where they are exposed as Datastream datatypes (the Worldscope "WC" item codes), or through [WRDS](/wiki/commercial/wrds/) where the institution licenses it. Check which route your institution provides. - **Keyed by Worldscope identifiers and item codes.** Data is keyed by Worldscope's own company identifier and by item ("WC") codes; an extract is a set of WC items pulled for a list of firms over a date range. - Terminal or API credentials are required. Keep any credentials in `.env`, never hard-coded. ## Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines) These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here. - **The "WC" item codes are the schema, and you must map them carefully.** A Worldscope extract is a list of WC item codes, and the same labeled item can be computed differently than its Compustat analog. As a result Worldscope and [Compustat Global](/wiki/commercial/compustat-global/) do **not** reconcile item-for-item; do not assume a WC item equals the same-named Compustat field. - **Accounting-standard heterogeneity limits comparability.** Firms report under local GAAP or IFRS with different adoption dates by country, so even after Worldscope's standardization, cross-country comparisons of a given item remain imperfect. Treat cross-border comparisons with caution. - **Currency.** Fundamentals are reported in native currency and need explicit conversion before any cross-country aggregation or comparison; do not mix currencies in a panel. - **Backfill and survivorship.** Worldscope has added historical data and firms retroactively, and the active list excludes dead firms; building a sample from only currently covered firms biases it toward survivors. Pin the extraction date and source a delisted/dead-firm list when survivorship matters. - **Identifier linking.** Worldscope codes must be linked to Datastream mnemonics and to returns and prices; the Worldscope-to-Datastream link is the usual join and has known mismatches. Verify the link rather than assuming a clean one-to-one map. - **Coverage and item availability vary by country and year.** Item availability and firm coverage are uneven, with more missingness in emerging markets and in early years. Do not read missing as zero, and check item-level availability before conditioning a sample on it. - **Documented data errors.** The comparative-database literature documents discrepancies between Worldscope and Compustat Global; do not treat individual items as ground truth. Cross-check material observations when a single firm or item drives the result. ## Reference: representative WC item codes | WC code | Item (category) | |---|---| | WC02999 | Total assets (balance sheet) | | WC03351 | Total liabilities (balance sheet) | | WC03995 | Common equity (balance sheet) | | WC01001 | Net sales / revenue (income statement) | | WC01651 | Net income before preferred dividends (income statement) | | WC04860 | Net cash flow, operating activities (cash flow) | | WC05001 | Market price, year end (per-share / market) | | WC05101 | Earnings per share (per-share) | Item codes are the extraction schema; pull the specific WC items you need and record them. Availability differs by country and year. ## Citation Cite the provider and database, e.g.: *Worldscope / Refinitiv (LSEG), accessed YYYY-MM-DD.* State the WC item codes used, the access route (Datastream or WRDS), and the extraction date so the sample is reproducible.