Sources of Macroeconomic Data

MACROECONOMIC INDICATORS

  • World Development Indicators is maintained by the World Bank. They maintain an annual data sets.
  • Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, populary known as the FRED Databse. It is one of the most popular data sources.
  • The Conference Board maintains a data for the leading, lagging and coincident indicators for many countries. The Business Cycle Indicators Handbook of The Conference Board is here.
  • International Financial Statistics of the IMF contains monthy, quaterly and annual data of most of the macroeconomic indicators.
  • Bonn Graduate School of Economics, Germany, maintains an histrocial data set, known as, Macrohistory Databse.
  • Penn World Tables is one of the most widely used databse for empirical papers on growth models. Feenstra, R. C., Inklaar,  R., & Timmer, M. P. (2015). The next generation of the Penn World Table. American Economic Review, 105(10), 3150-82. The link to this paper is here.
  • OECD database, that is, Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development maintains a Database.
  • Alternative Economic Indicators the editor of which is C. James Heung has six chapters that discuss recent advances in economic theory, economterics and information technology in order to capture broader, accurate and higher-frequency economic indicators.
  • The Center for Prospective Studies and International Information contains data related to global economy and it funded by the French Government.
  • The Center for Financial Stability maintains data related to Divisia monetary Aggregates for the US. The link to the data is here.
  • Bank for International Settlements maintain extensive data related to macroeconomic variables and the link to the data is here. One useful feature of extracting data from this source is that the data for all the countries can be coupled into one sheet.

MACROECONOMIC INDICATORS OF CHINA

  • A popular and authoritative database for the macroeconomic variables for the Chinese economy is Wind Database. A note, by Becker Friedman Institute, on retrieving the data has been provided here.
  • Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta maintains the macroeconomic database for China, and it is here.
  • The database for China Statistical Year Books is here.
  • The Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) has conducted five waves of household surveys, in 1989, 1996, 2003, 2008 and 2013. Here is the link.

DATA ON LABOUR

  • International Labor Organization maintains data related to labor.
  • The Employing Workers Index is maintained by the World Bank and the link to the data can be found here.
  • Data related to Labor Freedom is maintained by The Heritage Foundation and the link to the data is here.
  • The link to World Employment and Social Outlooks: Trends, which is maintained by the International Labor Organization can be found here.
  • The Sahm Rule identifies signals related to the start of the recession when the three month moving average of the national unemployment rate rises by 0.5 percentage points or more relative to it’s low during the previous 12 months. The data is maintained by FRED and the webpage of the economist Claudia Sahm is here.
  • The United Nations Industrial Development Organization maintains data related to industry for all the countries and the link to the data can be found here.
  • The indicators of product market regulation, maintained by the OECD, can be found here.
  • Data for Labor Market Policies are maintained by the Global Competitvness Report and the link to the data is here.
  • The most complete and consistent data source for value added at current and constant prices and employment that we found was the World Input-Output Database (WIOD).
  • The Beveridge curve is a relationship between job openings and the unemployment rate. The data for this is here.
  • But since the 2010s, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) has provided data on the deployment of robots by country and industry, and machine learning algorithms have made it possible to measure automation using text analysis of patents.

DATA ON INSTITUTIONS

  • Institutional Profiles data can be found here.
  • The database of the Political Institutions, maintained by the World Bank, is here.
  • The data related to Economic Structure, maintained by the Gronigen Growth and Development Center, is here.
  • The data on Economic Institutions is maintained by Political Reseach Group. The link to the data is here.
  • Freedom House maintains data related to Democratic Values. The link to the data here.
  • Data for Economic Freedom are maintained by the Fraser Institute and the link to the data is here. The five subset on which they calculate the overall score is size of the government; legal, system and property rights; sound money; freedom to trade internationally; and regulation.
  • The link to the Educational Attainment database can be found here.
  • The link to the Gender Development Index maintained by the UNDP is here.

DATA ON PRODUCTIVITY

  • Mano and Castillo (2015) Dataset is a disaggregated level of productivity for both traded and non-traded sector for a Large Panel of Countries. The Link to their IMF Working Paper.
  • Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers and Policies, the editor of which is Alistair Dieppe, is a cross-country databse of productivity. The book provides a far-reaching dataset of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies and a new sectoral database of productivity. 
  • The link to the paper written by Couharde, Delatte, Grekou, Mignon and Morvillier (2020) is here where the data derived from this source has been put to test the Balassa-Samuelson Hypothesis for the advaned, emerging market economies and developing economies.

DATA ON INFRASTRUCTURE

  • Data on the Quality of Overall Infrastructure can be found here.
  • Data on Logistics Performance Index can be found here.
  • Data on Global Supply Chain Pressure Index, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, can be found here.

DATA ON SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES

DATA ON TRADE

  • The data related to Internatinal Trade Statistics can found here. This site is the UN Trade Statistics. 
  • Terms of trade are defined as the ratio between the index of export prices and the index of import prices. If the export prices increase more than the import prices, a country has a positive terms of trade, as for the same amount of exports, it can purchase more imports. The link to data, maintained by OECD, is here.
  • The data for Trade in Value Added is maintained by the OECD and it is known as the TiVA database and it can be found here. Link to the note is here.
  • The Global Value Chain Database can be found here.
  • Nicita, A., & Olarreaga, M. (2007). Trade, production, and protection database, 1976–2004. The World Bank Economic Review, 21(1), 165-171. The link to the paper is here.

DATA ON EXCHANGE RATE

DATA ON FINANCE

  • IMF maintains Financial Development Index Database across time and for a cross section of countries. The link to the data can be found here. The link to the IMF Working Paper can be found here.
  • The link to the data on World Bank Enterprise Survey is here.

DATA ON INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS

A very common, though limited and misunderstood, means of identifying regional industry clusters is the location quotient (LQ). The location quotient is simply a ratio of employment shares: regional industry i’s share of total regional employment over national industry i’s share of total national employment. An LQ of 1.0 indicates that the regional economy has the same share of employment in industry i as the nation as a whole.