IFS on econ.bc.edu

International Financial Statistics on econ.bc.edu

The econ.bc.edu interface to IFS data allows you to select the series you want to retrieve, for specified countries and years, via a web browser. You need not use SQL nor have a special computer account on "millet" or "WRDS" to use this interface. 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 IFS database containing financial data on almost 250 nations and groups of nations (OPEC, IMF, etc.). This database contains annual, quarterly, and monthly data on over 1000 separate series, some going back to 1948.

The IFS database is comprised of separate database tables for annual, quarterly, and monthly frequencies. Not all series are available at all frequencies (particularly for developing countries, for which only annual data are often available). To use the econ.bc.edu database interface, you choose:

the frequency (A/Q/M) for which data are desired,
the categories of series from which series are to be chosen,
the specific series to be retrieved,
the countries for which data are desired,
and the first and last years.

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).

Please note that the downloaded series are identified by their series codes (ncodes), which are not permanent identifiers. The permanent identifiers assigned by IMF are the unhandy five-character codes such as ".AB.C", which always denote the same series. The ncodes may change with a database update. The country codes (ccodes) never change.

The data tables for IFS are quite large, with the monthly table containing over 5.5 million rows. You are urged to retrieve a reasonable number of series and countries. 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 (i.e. not available to MediaOne or BellAtlantic users). Please contact baum for assistance with this interface.

Last updated: 23 July 2000 by baum