You can use .isin()
directly in pandas filtering –
recent_indicators_filtered = recent_indicators[recent_indicators['CountryCode'].isin(developed_countries)]
Also, you can come up with a boolean column that says True
if developed –
recent_indicators['Developed'] = recent_indicators['CountryCode'].isin(developed_countries)
solved How to check whether data of a row is in list, inside of np.where()?