Economic Data
Governments, stock exchanges, and private corporations
gather huge amounts of economic data. Information is available for
wages, prices, profits, imports, exports, production, consumption,
investment, depreciation, etc etc.
I'm going to organize this material by who provides or
collects it. But don't worry, I'll give you a quick synopsis of what
everyone has so you'll know before you start clicking around.
Also, I'm going to concentrate on US data here. If you need data for
another country, jump to my
International
Economic Data page.
Finally, when I say data, I mean data. While most of these sites also
provide some analysis and interpretation of the data that they collect,
that's no substitute for the raw data itself. I'm sending you where
can find lots and lots of raw data to use for reports, projects, and
research. Raw data lets you make your own interpretations and come to
your own conclusions.
Economic Report of the President
Once a year, all the bureaucracies of the US Federal government have to get
together and provide the president with a full synopsis of what's going on
in the economy. All that information gets rolled into a huge report
that the president releases to the public and submits to Congress. If
you want to know about how the US economy is doing, this is your best bet for
one-stop shopping. In addition, the website provides a huge amount of
data going back typically 50 years. You'll find everything from
unemployment statistics, to exchange rates, to budget deficits.
Fed Stats
This
is an amazingly handy resources. If you go there, pretty much every
data item collected by the US government is properly categorized--even
alphabetically! So if you want data on abortions, that's at the top of
the list, while data on women-owned businesses is at the top of the list.
If your looking for US data, this should be your first stop.
Economagic.com
These guys have put together 200,000 data series, mostly for the USA.
You can look at all the data and make custom charts that you can cut and
paste for free. But if you want to actually cut and paste the raw data
itself, they're going to charge you the extremely low price of $1 per week
(for unlimited downloads). Also, teachers can set up their classes to
be able to cut and paste data for free. I consider these guys the best
private sector data vendors on the net.
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve sets United States monetary
policy. To do so, they keep a huge staff of economists and
statisticians, whose only job is to keep the Board members fully informed
about every aspect of how the US economy is doing. As a result,
their website contains a huge collection of data including interest rates,
bank assets and liabilities, measures of the money supply, foreign exchange
rates, and information on how consumers are doing managing their finances
(if you want lots info on consumers, check out the Fed's
Survey
of Consumer Finances.)
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
The
friendly economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank run FRED
II, a handy little service which has over 3,000 data series at your
disposal. This website is extremely efficient and well laid out.
So even though much of this data can be found elsewhere, its often easier to
find and download here. Banking, inflation, exchange rates, interest
rates, international trade data and lots more can be accessed using your new
buddy FRED II.
Congressional Budget
Office
These guys
are a non-partisan research group that Congress employs to tell it what the
likely effects of any policy change are going to be. There's a huge
amount of top quality economic thought reported here. And if you want
to know absolutely everything about the US budget, this is the place to go.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Here you'll find all sorts of data on how much people are earning, how often
they're getting injured on the job, how fast productivity is rising, as well
as inflation, the famous consumer price index (CPI), and how international
prices are changing.
Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Current Population Survey
The Current Population
Survey asks lots of very detailed questions to people about their employment
or unemployment situation. Here you can find out how long the average
duration of unemployment lasts, as well as how different socio-economic
groups are differentially affected by unemployment.
Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S.
Department of Commerce
Domestically, these guys keep
track of GDP, corporate profits, personal income and expenditures, travel
and tourism, etc. Internationally, they also keep track of
international investment flows, the US balance of payments, trade deficits,
and so on.
Internal
Revenue Service, TaxStats
The IRS has to keep each
individual taxpayer's returns a secret. But they are allowed to print
up overall averages of the data that gets submitted in tax returns.
This is very handy since it lets you know (on average) how much people are earning in
income and how much they are paying in taxes. The IRS also breaks
things down by demographic groups and by income tax brackets. You can also find lots of tax data about corporations, trusts, and any other
groups that have to submit tax returns.
US Department of Agriculture,
Economic Research Service
If you want data on
anything having to do with farming in the USA, it's here. They have
farm income, food prices, data on international sales of agricultural
products, how much US consumers spend on food, etc. Go check it out.
It's good grazing. Moo!
U.S. Census
Bureau
The U.S. Census does a lot more than count up
the number of citizens living in the USA every ten years. They also
keep tabs on business sentiment, housing, poverty levels, people's health
conditions, etc.
Securities and Exchange
Commission
The Securities and Exchange Commission
regulates businesses and financial exchanges. If you want to know how
much any given firm is paying in taxes, what its last financial statements
said, or any other public data that a company has to file, you can find it
using the EDGAR retrieval system. However, I have to warn you that it
is often must faster to simply use, say,
Yahoo! Finance to get at the same
information.
Statistical Abstract of the
United States
This book (and now CD and website)
contains all the most important socio-economic and economic data for the
USA. You're so lucky it's all available on-line nowadays. I
remember having to go down to the library to check out each year's new
edition. What a pain!
