Data Sources


Research Methods and Communication in Economics

Data Sources

Thanks to all students who came up with great data sources!

International Data

  • Eurostat.

    • Eurostat is the statistical office of the European Union. The dataset is divided in 9 themes: General and Region Statistics, Economy and Finance, Population and Social condition, Industry and Trade, Agriculture and Fisheries, International Trade, Transport, Environment and Energy, Science and Technology. (A. Bosio, F. Cellino)

  • OECD

    • The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international organisation. The OECD dataset collects information about the member countries -more than 100- on Agriculture, Development, Economy, Energy, Environment, Government, Health, Society and other topics. (S. Panero)

  • World Health Organization

    • The Global Health Expenditure Database contains data on different indicators and health expenditure. It contains data for 20 years (2000 to 2019) and many countries. (G. Adriano)

  • Kaggle.

    • Very easy to use thanks to its search bar. You can download data to excel. Data can be imported using Python (for example). Pros: It contains all kinds of data. From more "economic" topics like unemployment and interest rates to those like Yoga Posture Classification. So, we can find whatever data we want. Cons: Hard to use with Stata. Kaggle is used in the Jupyter Notebooks environment. (A. Bosio)

  • University of California Irvine Machine Learning Repository

    • The UCI Machine Learning Repository is a collection of databases, domain theories, and data generators that are used by the machine learning community for the empirical analysis of machine learning algorithms (A. Gianetti)

  • Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

    • Data on climate change (L. Faroppa)

  • Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)

    • The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides a wide range of statistics on the U.S. labor market. Some of the main statistics provided by the institution are the 1) Consumer Price Index (CPI), the 2) Employment Cost Index (ECI), the 3) Producer Price Index (PPI) and the 4) U.S. Import and Export Price Indexes. (A. Neri)

  • Enterprise Surveys Data

    • Firm-level survey of a representative sample of an economy’s private sector. The surveys cover a broad range of business environment topics including access to finance, corruption, infrastructure, competition, and performance measures. (F. Vellano)

  • GDELT Project

    • GDELT is an open-source database which collects all online news published every 15 minutes. The news are machine-translated in English and coded by theme, sentiment and tone, location and entity (organizations and persons). (E. Piccione)

  • JPAL Catalog of Administrative Data Sets

    • To assist researchers in screening potential data sources, J-PAL North America has cataloged a number of key US data sets. The catalog documents procedures on how to access data based on information provided by the originating agencies.

Italian Data

  • Istat: Italian National Institute of Statistics (in Italian: Istituto Nazionale di Statistica)

  • Crimes in Italy:

    • Data from Italian Ministry of Home Affairs on number of crimes and number of criminals in each Italian local district (20 “Regioni”, 107 “Province” and “Capoluoghi di Province”), for each year from 2016 to 2021. (F. Cellino)