Monday, February 13, 2006

Trade Statistics Sources

I know several of you have been thinking of doing papers on Trade and Development, while this is not my specialty, The following links may be beneficial to you if you've been having trouble finding general trade, finance, and development statistics. When using these, also keep in mind that if you just contact the appropriate UN office via email, they will direct you to the proper library, and most of the UN libraries, especially ESCAP have librarians that can help you locate the proper data sets for your purposes. UNCTAD keeps most of their publications in the front office (2 UN Plaza, 1120), but only in paper form. Remember to bring valid photo ID.

http://www.unctad.org/Templates/Page.asp?intItemID=1888&lang=1
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/ *

If you aren't familiar with nations that might come up in the course of your studies, or you have a suspicion there may be some social or political event behind a statistical abnormality, the CIA world factbook is a good place to start, and a handy tool that you might wish to have for a variety of other reasons. It can be found (and used online, or downloaded) at:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/

*COMTRADE will limit you to 1000 records unless you are using it from the UN Library, or you are a subscriber.

**Many of the PDF documents you can download online are unlocked, meaning you can copy/paste from them into the data editor of your choice, then convert them to stata, or if you find a way to do it efficiently, you can copy/paste directly into stata.

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