DRI-Global Insight Basic Economics on the Virtual Data Center


The Virtual Data Center interface to DRI-Global Insight Basic Economics data allows you to select the series you want to retrieve, for specified time periods, via a web browser. In order to access the data you must have a valid BC username and password. The data are either displayed in your browser or, more usefully, downloaded as a text file to your desktop system. A Stata program is provided that will transform the data to a more usable format. However, use of these data in any other package or spreadsheet is equally feasible, since the data are in text form.

Boston College receives monthly updates to the DRI-Global Insight Basic Economics database which contains United States macroeconomic timeseries from the financial, manufacturing, and government sectors. This database contains annual, quarterly, and monthly data on over 6000 separate series, some going back to 1946 (population to 1930).

Information on the various DRI-Global Insight Basic Economics series can be found in the DRI-Global Insight Basic Economics User's Guide, available for review in the O'Neill Library (call number REF HA30.3C5x).

The DRI-Global Insight Basic Economics database is comprised of separate database tables for annual, quarterly, and monthly frequencies. Not all series are available at all frequencies. To use the econ.bc.edu database interface, you choose:

You may only retrieve data of one timeseries frequency in a given retrieval request. If data of more than one frequency are needed, use a separate request for each frequency.

After making these selections, you are given a summary of your retrieval request (which you should print for further reference), and offered the choice to either Display Data or Download Data. If you DIsplay the data, it will appear in an HTML table in the web browser. Data in an HTML table are not machine-readable; this option is provided only for convenience. To work with the data, use the Download option. Note well the warning that if you retrieve more than one file to your desktop, the files must be renamed to prevent corruption. These text files can be accessed by any text editor, word processor or spreadsheet. Stata do-files are also provided to reformat (reshape) the data from the downloaded form to a panel format. The Stata module tscollap may be used to convert data from a higher to a lower frequency (e.g. quarterly averages of monthly series).

You are urged to retrieve a reasonable number of series and time periods. A request to retrieve a sizable fraction of the dataset may fail due to limitations of the hardware and software being used for database handling.

Licensing concerns imply that this interface is not presently available outside the Boston College network. Please contact baum for assistance with this interface.


Last updated: 25 October 2004 by baum