International
Economic Data
Here are some of the best sources for
international economic data. Many of them also provide socio-economic
data as well.
OECD
StatsPortal
The
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is a group of 30
developed or mostly developed countries. The OECD collects great data
for the members states and makes it very easy to get at. The link
above takes you to their StatsPortal site. If you want raw data, click
on the "Statistics" link on the left side (in the box labeled, "Find".)
The Penn World
Tables
Good economic
data to make international comparisons that go back for any length of time
is hard to get. So God bless Alan Heston and Robert Summers for
putting this data set together and then making it freely available.
You'll find data for over 156 countries covering everything from GDP, to
investment, to PPP adjusted incomes.
CIA World Factbook
If what you need is current data to make international
comparisons, then the Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook is
your best bet. It's always up to date and thoroughly researched.
You can either find out all about a given country on one handy page or use
it to compare countries and see how they vary in terms of a given statistic (GDP, for example). And all
the data tables are easily cut-and-pasteable into a spreadsheet.
Bank for International Settlements
These guys got started after WWI as a bureaucracy to
supervise the money that the USA lent to Germany to pay off the huge war
reparations that the French had demanded after the war. So since
that's all long in the past, what are they still around for? Beats me.
But they do put out lots of very nice data on international banking, the
trading of various countries' sovereign debt (i.e. the bonds that they
sell to finance their respective deficits), and interest rate and foreign
exchange derivative contracts.
The World
Bank
Like the sprawling
and unresponsive bureaucracy that it is, the World Bank isn't very good at
giving you raw data. In fact, despite the fact that it exists to serve
the world's poor and is totally tax payer financed, it still charges for
access to large amounts of its data. But the link above will take you
to its main data page, where some stuff is available for free. Definitely check out the
"Quick Reference Tables" link way down at the bottom of the page. In
addition, the geeks over in the research department have also made available
for free and public use a whole bunch of data sets that have been used in
various research papers over the years. You can get to those data sets
by scrolling down to "Research Datasets" (listed under "Key Outputs") after
you click
here.
The International
Monetary Fund
Like the
World Bank, the IMF is also a large, unresponsive bureaucracy that doesn't
give a large chunk of its data away for free despite using tax payer dollars to collect it
all. However, you can get some of it for free. It can be found
by accessing the
World Economic Outlook Databases.
Click through to the most recent World Economic Outlook Report and then use
either Country or Groups or WEO Aggregates to search through data for the
184 countries they have data on. They've got GDP, current account
balances, budget deficits, PPP exchange rates, and other data.
U.S. Census Bureau's
International Data Base
This contains demographic and
socio-economic data for 227 countries and regions. Everything from
infant mortality, to GDP per person, to literacy levels.
Global
Financial Data
These guys are kind of nutty.
They have over 6,500 historical and current financial data series covering
over 120 countries. The obvious stuff like exchange rates and stock
market indexes are here, but you can also get inflation in England in the 19
century. One warning: they charge for most of their data, and it's
often pricy. But they can get away with it since they're quite often
the only ones willing to sell this data one series at a time. (If you
want data from a major data vendor like Reuters or Bloomberg, you typically
have to buy a subscription to their entire data service--something that can
set you back several hundred thousands dollars a year. Yikes!)
