Best websites for Economic Data

The internet is full of economic data, if you know where to look for it. Below are links to some of the best sources of economic data published by various  websites. You can get macro and micro datasets to use in economics and finance research. Much of the data listed below is free and can be very useful for research and empirical work.

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1) economagic.com
Contains massive amounts of data on US economy over 400,000 time series. Downloadable in excel format.

2) freelunch.com
Great website with massive amounts of economic and financial data for free.

3) CIA Factbook
Very interesting basic social and economic data on all countries in the world.

4) UNCTAD Data
Extensive, Trade and Foreign Direct Investment Data

5) OECD Annual Data
Statistical data on macroeconomic data from the OECD covering 30 major economies

6) Econstats.com
Large source of historical data on US and other economies, both economic and financial data presented in a spreadsheet like webpage !

7) data.WorldBank.org
or data.worldbank.org/data-catalog
A huge collection of data over of 200,000 economic indicators, covering 200 countries, particularly useful for developing countries. The second link guides you to spreadsheets.

8) IMF.org
Superb resource for economic data 32,000 macro times series covering over 200 countries, plus direction of trade stats.

9) WTO.org
The place for trade data, including exports and imports by product group, trade in services and tariff related data

10) ilo.org
International Labor Office. Collects huge amounts of labor related data, including employment, wages, labor productivity, income distribution and more.

11) data.un.org
United Nations has data covering, crime, education, energy, environment, gender, health, population, tourism and trade.

12) OECD.org
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has many databases covering macroeconomic indicators, education, energy, finance, health, tax, trade and transport and more!

12) census.gov
Huge dataset on United States covering people and household, business and industry also results from 2010 census

13) Nationmaster.com
Use a vast databank from a variety of sources enabling you to compare one nation to another in chart form.

14) Penn World Table
Provides GDP and GDP per capita at PPP rates for some 189 countries.

15) Econ-datalinks.org
A listing of various data sources on economics, finance and business.

16) Eurostat
The place for statistics of all sorts on the European Union member countries, social, economic and demographic statistics are available.

17) visualizingeconomics.com
This site presents economic data for example on income distribution and house prices in a visual manner. Many creative ways of presenting data.

18) econdata.net
Provides links to a huge range of useful socio-economic data sets. Over 100 links to socioeconomic data sources arranged by subject and provider.

19) Bea.gov
The Bureau of Economic Analysis provides a comprehensive up to date picture of economic activity. US economic griwth, and regional economic development stats.

20) FRED
The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis provides over 45,000 time series data. Covers banking, macro series, exchange rates, international and more.

21) Fedstats.gov
A great resource for locating any US Federal government data. You can locate data by State or Data category. The amount of data indexed is vast as a search of the A to Z reveals.

22) TradingEconomics.com
Provides economic data on over 230 countries along with historical data on some 300,000 economic indicators including bond yields, stock indices and commodity prices. You can select regions.

23) Gapminder.org
A unique way of presenting data on economies, especially on the health and wealth of nations. Some great videos as well as many downloadable economic, demographic and social indicators.

24) StLoiusFed.org
The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis provides extensive economic and financial data via FRED 41,000 series are covered.

25) PrincipalGlobalIndicators.org
Run by the IMF this website provides the key macroeconomic data on the G20 economies. Superb resource.

26) Measuringworth.com
Provides links to long run historical data of currencies against the US dollar and UK and US economic growth rates.

27) MSCI.com
A great resource for the Morgan Stanley Capital Market Indices. You can find various market return indices measured in dollars, euros and other currencies

28) Workforall.net
A superb list of links to free economic and financial data. Special emphasis on OECD, US and European data.

29) OECD Data by Country
The above link allows you to search data by particular country from the source statistical agency of the country.

30) Yardeni Research
The Yardeni research stats page includes many useful links to data sources for the US and other economies.

31) Bls.gov/fls
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has this very useful section on foreign labour statistics. You can find employment and unemployment data, hourly compensation costs, productivity and unit labor costs and GDP per capita and hour.

32) indexmundi.com
Really useful website for economic data on various countries around the world. There is also commodity data and financial data such as exchange rates.

33) laborsta.ilo.org
The International Labor Office has statistics on the labor market covering some 200 countries. You can get all sorts of labor stats such as unemployment rates, economic activity rates, labor costs, wages and much more.

34) ebrd.com/economicsdata
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development publishes economics data on the transition economies including macro aggregates and survey data.

35) Comtrade.un.org
The United Nations Commercial Trade database is a huge resource with data on which country trades with which country and the breakdown of the goods each country exports into various sectors. 1.75 billion trade data points since 1962. Available for free.

36) fx.sauder.ubc.ca
The Saunder School of Business has a nice service providing free data on a large selection of currencies. There are both spot and forward exchange rate quotations

37) FT.com/DataArchive
The FT data archive is excellent in that you can look up bonds, equities, currencies and commodities on a given date. It generates a nice pdf file for the particular date you look up.

38) nationaldebtclocks.org
Check out the national debts of countries line Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, UK, Germany and US. It also gives the figure per capita.

39) RateInflation.com
Gives the rate of inflation data for many countries, you can also download historical data.

40) Tansparency.org
Run by Transparency International this site looks at corruption and bribery data. Its corruption perception index (CPI)measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption in 176 
countries.

41) Datosmacro.com/en
This site provides recent marco data for selected economies, along with risk premia, bond yields and also sovereign ratings. We have linked to the English version.

42) nber.org/releases
The National Bureau of Economic Research has a nice page linking to all the latest economic data and also links to the relevant archive for each series.

43) cdis.imf.org
The Coordinated Direct Investment Survey is an IMF database that enables you to view the top sources of inward and outward FDI stocks for a country - so for example you can see the UK is the biggest FDI investor in the US while the US invests most in the Netherlands followed by the UK.

44) UNCTAD.org/FDIdata
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has an excellent open access database for FDI flows for the period 1970 onwards both on flows and stocks. The data can be viewed either by Region of the World or individual
countries.

45) EPDC.org
The Education Policy Data Center has the world’s largest international education database with over 3.8 million data points from 200 countries. The data comes from national and international websites including household survey data sets as well as studies and reports

46) Globalization-index.org
The KOF index of globalization measures the degree of a country's globalization in an index using three criteria. Economic, social and political. It covers 208 countries for the period 1970 to present on an annual basis.

47) Prosperity.com
The Legatum prosperity index ranks countries around the world on the basis of many economic, social and political factors to gain an overall prosperity index. Data is freely available and you can select various criteria to compare countries.

48) Paris School of Economics/TopIncomes
The above links to the income distribution database of the Paris School of Economics great way to find out share of top 1%, 5%, 10% in national incomes and wealth for various countries over time.

49) stats.gov.cn/english
For anyone looking for Chinese economic data this is probably the best source. covers GDP, inflation, exports, imports and much more.

50) census.gov
or census.gov/compendia/statab
The US census site provides a huge range of data sets on the economy, business, population and other figures from the census. We like the quick facts that cover data on each State.

51) World-statistics.org
This website provides economics data on population, GDP, health, child labor, education and health. They can be presented in maps and table form. Many sources of data used.

52)Economicsnetwork.ac.uk/data
The Economics network site has a number of useful links to free economics data. There is a fairly detailed description of each data source as well.

53) Zanran.com
Zanran is like a google for finding data. The search engine finds ‘semi-structured’ data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs, spreadsheets, tables and charts. This data information can be difficult to locate using traditional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts.

54) Knoema.com
This is a superb innovative resource. Knoema is a knowledge platform that seeks to provide a uniform structure to economic data it finds and present it in a visually appealing manner. For example you can see GDP of each country at market exchange rates and using PPP. Lots of other data covering a huge range of economic subject areas. Superb resource.

55) Worldwide-tax.com
If you are interested in worldwide tax rates then this is an excellent resource. They have corporate and personal tax rates. Also there are employer and employee tax rates as well as the rates of Value Added Tax in different countries. Plus article relating to tax rates.

56) USTradeonline.gov
The official US data service gives access to cumulative U.S. export and import data for over 9,000 export commodities and 17,000 import commodities.

57) Offstats.auckland.ac.nz

The Office for statistics at the University of Auckland provides excellent links to data either by region, country or subject. All in all it links to a huge range of resources including international organizations, central banks, statistical offices and finance ministries.

58) fsi.imf.org
The Financial Soundness Indicators are devised by the IMF with the aim of supporting macro prudential analysis and assessing strengths and vulnerabilities of financial systems.. A range of statistics are available to look at the overall soundness of a country's financial system.

59) macmap.org
Market Access Map provides information about customs tariffs applied by 191 countries and faced by 239 countries. It also covers tariff rates, quotas, trade remedies, rules and certificates of origin, bound tariffs of WTO members, non-tariff measures and trade flows.

60) stats.oecd.org/oecdfactbook
The OECD factbook is a great way to represent country data in graphs. You can rank all OECD countries by a given variable such as GDP, population, exports and so on for a given year. It generates excellent charts.

61) Inflation.eu
If you want to get the rate of inflation for a particular economy then this website probably has it. You can also plot graphs of the inflation rate.

62) Quandl.com
This is a great resource for students and researchers. Once you sign in there is access to over 5 million economic, financial and social datasets. You can see a variety of sources where the data may exist and download and graph the data. A superb resource.

63) Nber.org/data
The National Bureau of Economics Research has links to many datasets. Includes macro data, industry productivity and digitization data, international trade data, hospital data, demographic data, patent/ scientific and other data.

64) Bankofengland.co.uk/sid
The Bank of England provides an excellent statistical interactive database. There is a huge amount of useful financial, economic and banking data. The data covers both UK and foreign countries. The A to Z index is particularly helpful.

65) Conference-board.org/data
The Conference Board provides some very timely economic data on the business cycle, labor demand and
trends. It also publishes several barometers of consumer and  business confidence, including the widely quoted Consumer Confidence Index and the Leading Economic Indicators.

66) wto.org/tariffprofiles
This link give the world trade organization annual compilation of bound and applied tariffs. The data is prepared annually by the WTO, ITC and UNCTAD.

67) doingbusiness.org
The World Bank's doing business website is a great way to find out how easy it is to set up and run a business in various countries. Each country is given a global rank. Each country is given a rank under each of 10 criteria.

68) intracen.org/trade-statistics
The International Trade Center collects masses of useful trade statistics and also details of the products which each country exports and imports.

69) Geohive.com
The Geohive website is full of statistics on things like population, global economic data such as GDP per capital, agricultural production and energy production and consumption. There are also useful links to where to find relevant country data.

70) econ.worldbank.org/Trade-Integration
The World bank trade and integration statistics cover trade policy, trade in services, international migration, labor and poverty, trade costs and facilitation and technology and productivity.


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