Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

by: Drazen Lucanin (drazen.lucanin at gmail.com)

An international economic organisation of 34 countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It is a forum of countries committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practices, and co-ordinate domestic and international policies of its members.

Member countries range from USA, UK etc. to Turkey, Hungary and Mexico. European countries make the majority, but there are also members from other continents.

OECD uses a statistics collection - analysis - implementation - monitoring cycle. The data it collects is available online.

Data

The data is collected for the member countries.

Topics include:

• economic outlook
• finance
• health
• education
• labour market
• sectors (R&D, transport, agriculture...)

Manual access

The data can be accessed from the statics extracts site or from the full database available on the iLibrary site.

*Note: Registration is needed to access the iLibrary. Free browsing of the data is only available through the statistics extracts, which delivers core OECD statistics.

Indicators can be searched:

• By keyword using “search” (e.g. GDP, Health, unemployment, income, population, labour, education, trade, finance, prices, Economic Outlook, Government Debt, Health expenditure ...)
• By theme in the left-hand menu or open Frequently requested data
• By accessing your saved queries under “browse queries”
• By country via the selection of key indicators in Country statistical profiles 2010

API

It is possible to export the data selected using the OECD.StatExtracts site] as an SDMX query, which means that it is possible to programmatically fetch the data in XML using a sort of a web service API.

Export formats

• XLS
• text (CSV, TSV)
• ready-made files (possibly including >1 000 000 data points)
• PC-axis
• SDMX (XML)

Conclusion

Seems like a promising site, with rich query definition, editing and merging capabilities. Perhaps these queries can be used programmatically using the SDMX query builder. Exporting to various formats is possible, anyway. Monthly and real-time data views are available.

The downside is that information is only available for a small number of member countries.