Economics 224-001/002, Fall 2005
Empirical Economics
Dr. H. King
Department of Economics
University of Regina
Regina, SK, Canada, S4S 0A2

 

A Partial List of Reliable Data Sources


A. University of Regina Library Databases

The University Data Library has a great deal of data in a variety of forms. It includes information on and direction links to online data bases.

  1. The Canadian Census Analyzer provides quite extensive access to current and past Canadian censuses.
  2. The Labour Force Historical Review has a wide variety of historical labour data. You would need to install the Beyond 20/20 browser first, open the data, and export it to Excel.
  3. The Canadian Crime Data is also in Beyond 20/20 format.
  4. The most useful database in many ways is the CANSIM II database. As the search engine on the CANSIM server is poor, it is usually best to locate the item first on the StatsCan CANSIM search site, record the data series label, and then use that to search the CANSIM site. WARNING: the CANSIM database has a lot of data with similar names, using the search mechanism can yield hundreds of results. A good starting place is the Quick Start page, or consult me if you need to. I have also included a list of basic crucial CANSIM Tables and Vectors below
  5. Note: the CANSIM data is also available is a somewhat more limited form on E-STAT, “Statistics Canada's interactive learning tool … for the education community”. E-STAT’s Data (http://www.statcan.ca.libproxy.uregina.ca:2048/english/Estat/licence.htm) contains a subset of the CANSIM database, but also includes some good tools for averaging/aggregating the data. This part of the tool is very useful.
  6. A great deal of U.S. and Canadian data is directly downloadable from the Internet Data Library System. You can search by the name of the survey, or by specific variables you are looking for, and then it can be downloaded directly to Excel.


B. Statistics Canada Websites

Statistics Canada is the premier national statistics agency in the world, with very high quality data. Much of it is accessible by the public, but some of it must be paid for. The University has signed up for the Data Liberation Initiative, and this data can be accessed for free by U of R students and professors via the University Data Library. The Statistics Canada website does have a wide variety of interesting databases, including:

  1. Key economic indicators for the past few years.
  2. Results from the 2001 Census, and the 2006 Census, including the results of Education and Salary, always interesting.
  3. Statistics Canada’s basic Justice and Crime data is at http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/ind01/l2_2693.htm. See also Statistics Canada webpage “Crimes by type of offence”, http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/legal02.htm.

C. Other Canadian Websites

  1. The Bank of Canada has data on money supplies, interest rate and other financial data, including some stock prices.
  2. The federal government Department of Finance provides a variety of economic and fiscal background information to the budget process.
  3. Saskatchewan Bureau of Statistics has a variety of Saskatchewan-oriented data (often collected from Statistics Canada).
  4. The library has access to issues of the SaskTrends Monitor, which has compilations of a variety of Saskatchewan data. Also see http://www.sasktrends.ca/.
  5. UBC’s Sauder School of Business maintains the Pacific Exchange Rate Service, which has data on exchange rates.

D. U.S. Websites

  1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has almost all the U.S. data (despite its rather narrow-sounding name).
  2. U.S. Crime Data can be accessed from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports website.
  3. Yahoo Finance has data on U.S. stock prices.
  4. The Baseball Archive has tons of baseball statistics, including salary data.
  5. Rodney Fort’s Sports Business Data page has a great deal of sports data on baseball, football, basketball and hockey.

E. International Websites

  1. The World Bank is good for development indicators.
  2. The International Monetary Fund has International Financial Statistics.
  3. The OECD is good for data on the major Western countries.
  4. The Penn World Tables are the best international comparisons over a longer time frame.

F. Crucial CANSIM Tables and Vectors

Note: 1. At the CANSIM website, when you wish to view the available choices in an entire matrix, you should choose to “access” the table, because you will see a nice index of the various series and their labels. If you know the label and use it, you can choose to “retrieve” the label, which will take you directly to the data series.

2. Be careful of the way in which the data is presented – yearly or monthly or quarterly. If you decide that you want the yearly figures for data that is presented monthly, then you will need to average the values of each month to get the annual data if the data is presented in monthly form.

Gross Domestic Product

1) Real GDP is measured in a myriad of ways. The best table for nominal GDP (quarterly) is Table 380-0001, while the best table for real GDP in annual form is 380-0017. Real GDP, quarterly from 1961-present is in series V1992292.

2) Nominal GDP and the components (measured by the Income Approach) is in Table 380-0001, with nominal GDP in series V498906.

Labour Market Variables

Table 2820001 gives a wide variety of employment, unemployment, participation variables, by province, age and gender. Series V2091177 is the unemployment rate by month for Canada.

Price Indices

The Consumer Price Index is in Table 3260001 (for all cities and all items, so some work is needed if you open this table). The values for Canada, all-items, from 1914 to the present, are in series V735319.

 

This page maintained by Harvey King. Last revised January 25, 2009. Copyright 2009, Harvey King. All rights reserved.