World by chartsThe World Bank decided to open up and set its data free!
I have started importing some 167,000 series. This is mostly agricultural data. More coming soon. We now house more than 400,000 series in the site.
You can sample the series by looking at just one country.
Links:
Search for data about Switzerland (rich interface)
Search for data about Switzerland (HTML interface)
Books:
World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change
Series of interest:
Number of tractors in Switzerland
The St. Louis Federal Reserve has added two new series about unemployment. They now track unemployment median (FRED_UEMPMED) and average durations (FRED_UEMPMEAN), in weeks. For whatever reason, the median only extends back since 1967, whereas the average extends back from 1948. I personally prefer to look at median, which is the number of weeks half of the people stay unemployed, because it is less sensitive to truncation (when people abandon job search).
The statistics are a bit worrisome. First of all, there is an unmistakable upwards trend in duration of employment – which is more visible in the average series. The current median is 18 weeks – more than 4 months – the highest it’s been on record. In early 2007, the most recent bottom in employment rate at around 4.5%, it was about 8 weeks. In the 1982 crisis, when unemployment hit 11%, the median unemployment rate was only about 12 weeks.
For a given fixed unemployment rate, if we have longer median unemployment, it means one thing: fewer people are laid off, but when they are, they do not go back to work for a longer time.
There is plenty of room for debate as to why this would be the case. Puritans would tell you that people are getting lazy, and unemployment benefits are just too good. Socialists might deplore that this is a proof of opportunity inequality: a certain class of people is targeted for layoffs, and when they lose their current job, all hope is lost. Skeptics would question the accuracy of the statistics.
Whatever the case, it does not look good to me – unemployment is becoming a serious hardship.
Links:
Books:
Unemployment Dynamics in the United States and West Germany
Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long-Term Unemployment
Series of interest:
I’m slowly working my way through the BLS data. I have integrated mass layoff (ML).
As it turns out, all of these BLS data series conspired to blow up my web site and I had to go back to the drawing board with some optimizations.
In total, ML data contained 35,247 new series.
This brings the overall number of series to 200,103. There are 32 million data points, or 160 data points per series on average.
I have added more data from the BLS. About a third overlaps with data aggregated by the St Louis Federal Reserve branch (FRED). Overall, 64,108 new series were added to the database.
This brings the new total number of series to 164,868. We have about 189 points per series on average, and the total number of data points available is 31,259,708.
Links:
Series of interest:
Another 17000 time series added from BLS. We now have:
Links:
Books:
Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History
Series of interest:
I once witnessed a heated argument over whether the King of Morocco was briefed (and cared) about the price of milk in Morocco. Don’t let such rumors circulate about you! We warehouse 20 thousand times series from the BLS.
If your butler doesn’t let you in on the street price of bread, find out from us. Without facing the pestilence of commoners.
Links:
Tornqvist formula used for substitution in the chained CPU
Books:
Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls
Prices and Production and Other Works On Money, the Business Cycle, and the Gold Standard
Series of interest:
