This database, collected by INFORUM, a project building an inter-industry model of the U.S. economy, processes a wide variety of macro data and places it in a common format. Data includes the National Income and Product Accounts, balance of payments, flow of funds, monthly employment surveys, CPI, PPI, Business Conditions Indicators, blue pages from the Survey of Current Business, industrial production, the Penn World Tables, and state and local data including employment, earnings, GSP and state personal income. International data from the IMF and World Bank is available, but permission must be obtained from them. One hopes, that with time, this will change.
The data is accessed by programs (only for PCs) provided by this project and it can easily be output to ASCII or into a spreadsheet format. The data is also compressed with pkzip, and they provide this and similar programs as well.
For introductory information, a brief overview is in "readme.doc", while more detailed information is in "Instruction/contents.doc" and "Instructions/guide.doc".
The program that retrieves data (PDG) is relatively straightforward, but let me add my own experiences. First, you may need to change the path to the help files in the "g.cfg" file. Assuming that you're in a directory with one of the unzipped data files, start the program by typing "pdg". Then, a return will allow you to start normally. The command "look" allows one to survey the data in that file (additional commands are found on the bottom of the screen that allow you to print the data to the screen or graph it). One leaves the look command with an escape. To print the data to an external file in columns, use the "matty" command. After typing "matty" and the full file name you choose, you'll be prompted for the series names that can be obtained with "look". Don't separate series names with commas and be sure to end the command with a semicolon. The output of matty lists dates in the first column, but you'll need to modify the fractions used to denote months and quarters. Finally, you can easily plot data to the screen to get an approximate idea of what it looks like.
telnet://gopher@info.umd.edu Educational Resources/Academic Resources By Topic/Economics Resources/EconData
http://www.inform.umd.edu/Educational_Resources/AcademicResourcesByTopic/EconomicsResources/EconData/.www/econdata.html
ftp://info.umd.edu/inforM/EdRes/Topic/Economics/EconData
gopher://gopher.inform.umd.edu/11/EdRes/Topic/Economics/EconData
Bill Goffe <bgoffe@whale.st.usm.edu>