R programming for beginners

This course website accompanies the introductory R course taught in the Master GPE (CERDI / IHEDD). It is designed for students with no prior experience of programming or data analysis: 6 sessions of 3 hours (18 hours in total).

The running thread is a single question, “Growth, health and inequality: what do the data say about developing countries?”, explored with World Bank (WDI) and World Inequality Database (WID) data.

Each session page mixes the R code with charts of the results, diagrams of the key concepts (the pipe, joins, reshaping, how a report is built), short “Key idea” and “Common mistake” boxes, and exercises with collapsible solutions.

Objectives

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Work comfortably in R and RStudio.
• Import, clean and combine real-world datasets.
• Describe data and estimate simple regressions.
• Communicate results with clear figures, maps and reproducible Quarto reports.

Sessions

1. Getting started with R and RStudio
2. Importing and exporting data
3. Data manipulation (dplyr, tidyr, joins)
4. Descriptive statistics and regression
5. Visualising with ggplot2 (and maps)
6. Advanced visualisation and Quarto reports

Dataviz workshop (in French): Atelier dataviz, une figure pour la note au ministre.

See also the resources page for references and data sources.

Before the first session

1. Install R and then RStudio Desktop.
2. Download the course data archive (data.zip) and unzip it in a folder you will use for the course.

Last updated: 14 October 2026.