Hard_Copy

Hard Copy Data Sources
"Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it."

Effective data analysis begins with knowing where to get the data. At the present time you can access data/information in two primary forms, in the printed form or the electronic form.  Here we will look into the hard copy sources of data so we will begin with the basics of the library.  If you get to your senior year and you have not uncovered the secrets of where data is in the library, it is not something to be celebrated. By your senior year you should know the library and where to find information in it. At the risk of oversimplifying the situation, the library is the place to go to find information in newspapers, magazines, books, professional journals, and government publications.  If you are to be successful in your work, you must be able to identify which source you are interested in, how to find the information in that source, and how to find it quickly.

How then does one go about deciding on which sources to search and how to conduct the search? The decision regarding the appropriate sources to search depends in large part on the importance of timeliness and completeness. Newspapers and magazines are valuable because they contain timely stories or information, but usually it is only the summary numbers that are presented in the stories. If you want current, not too detailed information, then you should begin here. Books, meanwhile, are less timely, but contain far more detailed information. A third source of information would be professional journals. These are generally written by professionals for other professionals in their discipline and are of value to upper level undergraduate students and graduate students. Because of long delays due to the refereeing process and publication backlogs, these publications are less timely than newspapers, but more timely than books. Finally, there are government publications which provide written reports and data compiled by a number of government agencies. These data can range from timely, when we are dealing with quarterly or monthly updated data such as current GDP, unemployment , and the inflation rate, to outdated data such as average wages for agricultural workers in 1800 or balance of trade statistics in the post WW II period.

Once you have decided on the material to be searched, you are ready to begin the search process. So where do you begin? What is your game plan? It helps if you realize that there is actually a plan to the library, one that is not at all obvious to the casual user. There are three separate divisions of the library that you should become familiar with, the Reference Section, the Government Publications Section, and what I will call the Main Section. Where you spend most of your time will be dependent on your project, but you should feel somewhat at home in each of these areas, you should be aware of what each section has to offer and how to track down that information.

Of the three divisions, I expect that you know the most about the Main Section and least about the Government Publications Section. For this reason, the emphasis here will be on finding information in Government Publications. Before we begin our tour of Government Pubs, however, let us briefly assess the situation in the other divisions.

The Main Library and the Reference Section

The Main Section contains the library's book collection. This is where you would expect to find Adam Smith's, The Wealth of Nations, Charles Dicken's, David Copperfield, or Paul Kennedy's, The Rise and Fall of Nations. This is where you might begin your search for information on the urbanization of Latin America, the impact of the automobile on American society, the baby boom generation and its impact on the U. S. economy, or inequality in America. At the present time, your search of the University's book collection will begin in the main lobby. Here you will find the traditional card catalog, similar to what you have seen in other libraries, and a bank of computer terminals that provide electronically the same information as that contained in the card catalog. This will provide you with a call number that will help you locate the book on the shelves, most of which can be found in the stacks on the upper floors of the library. If on the other hand, you happen to be interested in searching the shelves of other libraries, including the Library of Congress, then you will be able to do that via from computers or computer terminals scattered across the campus. More about that latter, now let us return to the URI Library.

Often times you will not be able to find all that you need for your project in the Library's Main section. What if you wanted to know what the monthly mortgage payment would be on a $100,000 home mortgage you are considering, the economic and political situation in Costa Rica because you are thinking of moving there, the names of US companies with operations in Latin America who might be interested in hiring you because of your fluency in Spanish, how to write a resume for you job interview or some guidelines for a talk that you have to give to your company's board of directors, or some articles on the subject of drug legalization which is your topic for your semester research project? The place to go to answer these questions would be the Reference Section. This is where your search would begin if you were going to search magazines, newspapers, professional journals, or a wide array of reference volumes including encyclopedias.

If you are interested in newspaper articles, you should locate the hard copies of indexes for individual newspapers including The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, that can be searched by subject. These indexes can be found on the desks in the reference section and they will point you to the appropriate location of the articles in the University's microfilm collection on the first floor. Also accessible via the computer terminals is a data bank of newspaper abstracts that permits a search of some of the nation's major newspapers beginning in January of 1992. This index, entitled Newspaper Abstracts on Disc, can be found under the General Section on the CD-ROM directory. An additional possibility would be Newsbank, an index of articles appearing in newspapers published in over 100 cities. This index, which can be searched via hard copies found near the newspaper indexes or via computer terminals where you will find it located in the same General Section of the CD-ROM directory, will lead to you the University's microfiche collection.

Searches of magazines and professional journals also should begin in the reference section. The most popular index, and the one you are already likely to have used would be the Guide to Periodical Literature. This is an index of articles appearing in a wide array of magazines that should be readable for all students and is available in hard copy form only. The information can also be obtained via computer by searching Periodical Abstracts on Disc, which is located in the General Section of the CD-ROM directory and includes all the information covered in The Readers' Guide. Armed with the appropriate issues of the magazines, you will need the URI Serials List to find their exact location on the shelves. If it is a recent article, you will find it in the Current Periodical room on the main floor, otherwise it will be on the shelves, most likely on the first floor.

In addition to these indexes, there are more specialized indexes, a complete listing of which is posted in the Reference Room. Two which might be of value to economics students would be the Social Science Index (SSI) and the Public Affairs Information Service Bulletin (PAIS ), both available in hard copy and electronic form. Included in the first of these indexes will be articles from professional journals in economics as well as the other social sciences, while in the second there will be citations for journal articles in English as well as a number of European languages. This second index might be particularly valuable when conducting a country study or looking for an international perspective on some issue.

Additional indexes that might prove useful to students in economics or business courses would be the hard copy Business Periodicals and the CD-ROM product ABI/Inform found in the Business section of the CD-ROM directory. Both of these indexes cover a wide array of popular press magazines and professional journals. The ABI/Inform index contains 150 word abstracts from articles in over 800 business publications. For the more advanced economics student there is the Journal of Economic Literature which contains articles in professional economic journals and has replaced the Index of Economic Articles. As you would expect, on a number of topics there is a considerable amount of overlap in the business and economics indexes.

There are also a few other indexes which might prove useful to some of you. For those interested in demographic issues I would suggest Population Index , a source for articles on demographic issues such as the declining birth rate or the aging of the U. S. For those interested in urban issues (ECN402 people), there are the Urban Studies Abstract, the Urban Affairs Abstract and the Index to Current Urban Documents which will provide you with a guide to what is being written in the field of urban studies. If you find yourself doing research in either of these areas, I would suggest that you also check out the demography and urban sections of the Journal of Economic Literature.

In addition to these indexes, the Reference section contains a number of reference books, periodicals, and data sources. As I indicated before, this is where you will find the encyclopedias, the reference source of choice for most high school reports. You will also find many of the primary documents, the documents that were used as references by the writers of the encyclopedia articles as well as many 'how to' documents. For example, any article you write on France will most certainly have some information regarding the country's population growth, its major industries, and its patterns of trade, information that you will most likely find in the Reference section. In fact, it is the immense scope of the material located in this section that makes it possible to describe only a small sample of the available information. If you want to know more about what is there, I would suggest that you browse through the H section of Reference which contains most of the economic/business/management information.

One area of considerable interest which I will mention briefly is international information sources. As the globalization process continues, it will become increasingly important to have access to information concerning the performance of companies, industries, and national economies in all areas of the world. A sampling of some of the more recent works is provided at the end of this section. Included there are a number of references describing important national differences (ex. Banking Structures in Major Countries and The International Handbook of Corporate and Personal Taxes), sources of information on multinational or foreign firms (ex. Directory of Multinationals and How to Find Information About Foreign Firms), guides to statistical data (ex. Sourcebook of Global Statistics or Comparative World Data: A Statistical Handbook for Social Sciences), and studies targeted at various areas in the world (ex. African Industry in Figures and Asian Markets: A Guide to Company and Industry Information Sources). Also located in the Reference section are a number of monthly, quarterly, and annual data sources published by the major international organizations: the United Nations (UN), the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). A partial listing of what international data sources are available can be found in the Appendix at the end of this guide.

Before leaving the Reference section, we must mention a few more documents that reside there. If you are looking for some information provided by the government and wanted to talk to a person, then you may want to look at Subject Guide to U.S. Government Reference Sources or Federal Statistical Source: Where to Find Agency Experts and Personnel: 29th Edition where you would find the name and phone number of the person to contact. If, on the other hand, you have questions at the state and local level, you may want to read through State and Local Statistics Sources: A Subject Guide to Statistical Data on States, Cities, and Locales. Two other useful reference sources are Data Map 1990: Index of Published Tables of Statistical Data which contains information appearing in a number of publications including the Statistical Abstract of the United States, Demographic Yearbook, and International Trade Statistics Yearbook and Economic Indicators Handbook which provides an extensive set of data series on many aspects of the U.S. economy.

For those interested in demographic data, there are a number of useful publications located in the Reference section. One which has a business focus and includes both economic and demographic data at the county level, information potentially valuable to a marketer, would be User's Guide to Demographics USA 1993, County Edition. An historical look at demographic changes in the U.S. can be found in The Population of the United States: Historical Trends and Future Projections and Population History of Eastern U.S. Cities and Towns, 1790-1870. To find data on the changing structure of the American family, there are the Statistical Handbook of the American Family and The Family in America, Opposing Views. Finally, for the business manager long on information needs and short on time, there are a number of useful publications including Executives Business Information Sourcebook, Handbook of Business Strategy: 1992/1993 Yearbook, and Executive's Portfolio of Model Speeches for All Occasions.

If at this point you are still a bit uncertain as to the procedure for tracking down information in these sections of the library, then you should study the "How To" publications provided by the library. Some of the available guides are:

These 'How To' guides will help point you in the right direction. They are a complement and not a substitute for the people who work in the library. You should get to know the people in the reference and government publications sections of the library. They are the gate keepers to a wealth of important data. Remember, the key is efficiency. If your roommate goes to the librarian and finds the correct information in 30 minutes and you shuffle around on your own for 2 hours, you have lost 90 minutes of your life which you could have used to do something more productive.

Government Publications

I know you are tired and already feeling a bit overwhelmed by the vast array of data sources available to you, but our trip through the library is not done yet. What if you wanted data on the cost of health care in the U. S. over the past ten years, the income and population of all of Rhode Island's cities and towns, IRS data on effective tax rates for different income classes, or data on employment growth and unemployment rates in the 50 states? If these were on your 'got to have it' list, then you would want to make your way into the Government Publications Section of the library which provides reports written and data compiled by a number of federal and state government agencies. But how do you find anything in this area where the call numbers look so different? To track down the information you can begin with the CIS Annual: Index of Congressional Publications. You will look here to find transcripts of House and Senate hearings, committee prints, reports, documents, executive reports and treaty documents, and public laws. The Index, published monthly with annual editions, is used to find references in the CIS Annual: Abstracts of Congressional Publications which contains the SUDOC number to be used in tracking the source document down on the library shelves on the main floor.

Also of potential value is the American Statistics Index (ASI). This index, also published monthly with annual summaries, is a comprehensive guide to any statistical publications of the US government. Included in the ASI will be data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department, the two major providers of economic data. As with CIS, the ASI is used to find information in the accompanying Abstracts which contains a brief summary of the data as well as the SUDOC number. There is also a computer data base. The Governments Documents Catalog Service (GDCS) can be accessed from the terminal located at Government Publications office at the library. It provides an index of data published by the government since 1976 and can be accessed by subject, by title, and by keyword.

And then there is always the inefficient approach of walking through the Government Publications' stacks, something you save for that rainy day when you have some time to kill. To the uninitiated, the stacks seem very much like a maze, you have a general idea of what you want at the end of your journey, but no sense of where in the stacks to begin your journey and of how to interpret the street signs, which look so odd to those of you familiar with the remainder of the library. Fortunately, there is a semblance of a system in the Government Publications section. It helps if you begin by acknowledging the fact that there are many departments of the government that are responsible for collecting and recording data, that each department has a specialty, an area of primary concern, and that each department has its own section in the stacks. More importantly, once you know the agencies involved, you will better understand the SUDOC numbers that identify the documents on the shelves. For those of you in economics, which means virtually all of you, the two most important agencies are the Commerce Department and the Labor Department, so we will focus our search on these areas.

Commerce Department

The Commerce Department is by far the largest data collection agency of the federal government. If you want to find the nature of the publications of the Commerce Department, you should browse through the stacks that have numbers beginning with the letter C. One of the Commerce Department's primary responsibilities is conducting the various censuses which are done by the U. S. Census Bureau. For an overview of the Census Bureau's work I would suggest the annual publication, Census Catalog and Guide, which provides information on Census projects and the form in which the information is available (printed reports, computer tapes, floppy discs, CD-ROM, microfiche, or on-line to microcomputers). The Census Bureau's on-line data service is called CENDATA and it is made available to users by the information service companies, CompuServe and DIALOG. A list of the information available on CENDATA is provided in the introduction to Census Catalog and Guide. A considerable amount of data supplied by Commerce is available on CD-ROM and via the Internet, but more about that later.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of the Census is where you would go if you wanted to know anything about the past, current, and future size and composition of the U. S. population. It is here that you would look for answers to questions such as, what is the age, gender, race, and ethnic background of the U. S.; where are those people living, in the North or the South, in the city or a suburb, in an apartment or in their own home; and how they are living, when do they tend to get married and what is the likelihood of divorce, how many live in traditional, Leave it to Beaver, nuclear families and how many in single parent families. The Commerce Department is responsible for conducting the U. S. Census of Population and Housing, that once a decade inventory of the nation's people. In the stacks you should find, at least theoretically, all of the US Censuses beginning with the 1790 census, which identifies individuals by name, and ending with the hotly debated 1990 census. For those interested in the 1990 census, the data are also available on computer tapes, CD-ROMs, and on-line.

In addition to the decennial censuses, you will also find a number of Commerce Department studies that appear in their Current Population Report series. The P-20, or Population Characteristics series, is aptly described, and contains annual updates of data pertaining to many characteristics of the American people. The best indicator of the focus of these reports would be a sampling of titles on recent reports: Educational Attainment in the United States: March 1991 and 1990, Household and Family Characteristics: March 1992, The Hispanic Population in the Unites States: 1992, and Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1992. This is where you would go to find out ethnic differences in educational attainment, changes in the average family size and the growth in single-parent families, divorce rates and the living arrangements of the nation's elderly population.

Estimates of the nation's population in the ten years between the census and forecasts of population change at the national and state levels are most likely to be found in the P-25 series of Current Population Reports. Included here are the recent publications Population Profile of the United States: 1993, U.S. Population Estimates, by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1980 and 1991, and Population Projections of the United States, by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1992 to 2050. This is where you would find the data indicating the forecasts of changes in the age, racial, ethnic, and regional composition of the population. For those interested in population estimates for smaller areas, then the P-26 series, Local Population Estimates would be the appropriate starting point in your search.

If you were interested in the economic condition of Americans, you would be well advised to peruse the P-60, Consumer Income series of reports. It is here where you would find data concerning the income of American families and households, the extent of poverty and the distribution of income and wealth in the nation. Additional data on the economic condition of Americans appear in the Household Economic Studies, the P-70 series. Two of the recent titles are, What's it Worth? Educational Background and Economic Status: Spring 1990, somewhere you might look to see what are the economic returns to a college education and the choice of a major, and Job Creation During the Late 1980's: Dynamic Aspects of Employment Growth.

Before you leave this section of the stacks, there is one more series which you may want to check out, the Special Studies or P-23 series. Included here are studies on issues of widespread concern at the time. For example, in the past few years there have been studies on the aging of the population, Sixty-Five Plus in America; on changing fertility patterns of American women, Studies in American Fertility: Late Expectation: Childbearing Patterns of American Women for the 1990s; and changes in the composition of households, Studies in Household and Family Formation: When Households Continue, Discontinue, and Form.

And there is still more. The Commerce Department's Census Bureau is also responsible for the economic censuses that are conducted every 5 years for years ending in 2 and 7. In addition to the Censuses that have been published on the 5 year cycle which began in 1967, there are the Censuses of 1963, 1958, and 1954. Before this time there seemed to be little in the way of a pattern to the individual censuses. For a description of the Census Bureau's publications before 1972, you will find the Bureau of the Census Catalog of Publications: 1790 - 1972 to be an invaluable resource. The nine censuses currently undertaken are:

The Economic Censuses contain data available for separate industries identified by SIC code (Subject Series) and by geographic area (Geographic Area Series). For example, you will find the volumes: 1987 Census of Wholesale Trade, Geographic Area Series: Virginia and 1987 Census of Manufactures, Industry Series: Electrical Transmission and Distribution Equipment and Electrical Industrial Apparatus. While the data may vary between censuses, in general the data are available for the United States, states, metropolitan areas, counties, incorporated places of 2,500 or more inhabitants, and 5-digit ZIP codes.  Below is a sample of some of the data available in the Economic Censuses.

The Commerce Department is also responsible for assembling much of the foreign trade data. For an overview of the available trade data and the form in which it is available, the Commerce Department published the Guide to Foreign Trade Statistics, 1991. These data appear in the U. S. Merchandise Trade, a monthly publication of trade statistics available in a series of press releases entitled U. S. Department of Commerce News or on the Department of Commerce's electronic bulletin board. Also available on a monthly basis are the publications U.S. Merchandise Trade: Selected Highlights and U.S. Merchandise Trade: Exports, General Imports, and Imports for Consumption. If you are interested in export information, there are the monthly publications U.S. Exports of Merchandise on CD-ROM (CDEX), U.S. Exports of Merchandise-4-Digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) Based Product Code (microfiche), and U.S. Exports of Domestic and Foreign Merchandise, and the quarterly publication, U. S. Exports by State/Region of Origin (CD-ROM, on-line). For import information there are the monthly publications U.S. Imports of Merchandise on CD-ROM (CDIM), U.S. U.S. General Imports and Imports for Consumption (microfiche), and U.S. Imports for Consumption-10-digit HTSUSA Commodity by Country: Annual .

Most of the measures of aggregate income and production that appear regularly in the financial press and even the nightly news are also produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) section of the Commerce Department. You have most likely heard mention of two of the Commerce Department's most popular measures; GDP, the acronym for Gross Domestic Product which represents our best effort at estimating the value of goods and services produced in the United States during the year, and personal income, a measure of the income available to households to finance their spending and saving during the year. It is Commerce that is responsible for the National Income Accounts (NIA), the income statements for the U. S. economy that are produced quarterly. Hard copy versions of historical time-series NIA data for the period 1929 to 1988 can be found in BEA's two volume publication, National Income and Product Accounts of the United States. and its Business Statistics, 1963-91. For more current NIA and other Commerce Department data, the most complete coverage is provided in the monthly serial, Survey of Current Business available in the Current Periodical section of the library. We will see later how these data can be accessed via the Library's CD-ROM collection or via the Internet.

Commerce is also responsible for development of the Index of leading indicators, a potentially valuable tool for forecasters. By far the most difficult job in forecasting is identification of the turning points, the points when an expansion ends or the recession begins. For example, what would you do if you are interested in forecasting interest rates or industry sales? As you will see elsewhere, there are many options open to you, but most methods share a common structure. When attempting a forecast of sales or interest rates, we can attempt to link movements in these phenomena with movements in some variable for which we can more easily obtain forecasts. At the top of a short list of potential 'drivers' for your forecasts would be aggregate output, GDP. After identifying the link between interest rates or sales and GDP and forecasting GDP, you have the basis for a forecast of interest rates or sales. But how do we forecast GDP? One possibility is to develop something akin to the Index of Leading Indicators published by the Commerce Department. In the ideal world, the one pictured below, the pattern of the leading indicator is identical to that of the phenomenon under review with one important exception. The cycles are out of phase, the leading indicator provides us with a picture of what will happen before it happens. Unfortunately, the world is far less than perfect and the Commerce Department's Index has been known to miss a few turning points, identify some that never materialized, and provide leads that vary widely in terms of lead time.

What is missing at this time? What are the economic indicators that you are familiar with that have not been mentioned? One of the most obvious would be the unemployment rate. We have also said nothing much about employment and earnings, productivity or inflation. For this information, we must turn our attention to the Labor Department and its Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Labor Department

As its name suggests, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) division of the U. S. Labor Department provides most of the indicators of performance in the labor market, and if you could see a pattern emerging in the previous section, then you know that the Labor Department publications can be found in the L stacks. A valuable guide to what data you will find in these stacks and what was the method used to derive them is the BLS Handbook of Methods, Bulletin 2414, issued in September 1992. In addition to the monthly figures on unemployment, the BLS provides statistics on employment, compensation and working conditions, productivity and technology, prices and living conditions, and economic growth and employment projections.

The primary source for much of the employment, unemployment, earnings, and productivity data is the monthly publication, Employment and Earnings. It is here that you would look to find the unemployment rate among construction workers, males with a high school education, and teenagers; the number of workers employed in the production of household furniture, in the construction industry in California, or in clerical jobs; average hourly earnings of retail workers, average hours worked among service workers, or average weekly earnings of manufacturing workers in Rhode Island; and the growth rate in productivity. The BLS is also responsible for computing the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the most widely used measure of the price level, or cost of living, and the basis for the monthly inflation figures. More than you ever want to know about the CPI can be found in the monthly publication CPI Detailed Report.

In addition to these monthly publications, the BLS also provides a series of Bulletins on a wide array of topics, some one-time specials and some ongoing series. A list of some of the regular publications would be Geographic Profile of Employment and Unemployment, 1992 (Bulletin 2428), Consumer Expenditure Survey, 1990-91 (Bulletin 2425), Employee Benefits in State and Local Governments, 1990 (Bulletin 2398) and Employee Benefits in Small Private Establishments 1990 (Bulletin 2388), Employment and Wages Annual Averages, 1990 (Bulletin 2393), Employment Cost Indexes and Levels, 1975-92 (Bulletin 2413), Relative Importance of Components in the Consumer Price Index, 1991 (Bulletin 2408). Some of the more recent irregular publications are Displaced Workers, 1987-91 (Bulletin 2418), A Profile of the Working Poor, 1988-90 (Bulletin 2418), Employee Benefits in a Changing Economy: A BLS Chartbook, Bulletin 2394, Working Women: A Chartbook, (Bulletin 2385), and Outlook 2000, (Bulletin 2352?).

The BLS also conducts surveys of local area wages that appear in the periodic publications, Area Wage Surveys and Occupational Compensation Survey: Pay Only. These publications provide earnings data for a number of specific occupations in metropolitan areas that are used to help set local pay adjustments for federal employees under the Federal Employee Pay Comparability Act of 1990. If you want to get a sense of wage differences between areas, this would be a better source than the BLS data on average weekly earnings.

The problem with most of these data, if timeliness is important, is that they are outdated by the time that they appear in these publications in your Library. If you are interested in the most recent data, I would suggest that you pick up the phone and call the Boston office of BLS or track down their News releases in the Library that provide timely data. You may also want to try your hand at, but let us first look at some of the other sources of data in the Library.

Other Agencies

At this point you are on your own. If you are looking for crime statistics, you might head to the J section (Justice) and look for the publications of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Among other statistics you will find in this section are the annual Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics and Correctional Populations in the United States. If you were interested in information on education, then you could browse the E stacks (Education) or check out the Government Publication's reference shelf where you will find the Digest of Education Statistics-1992 and The Condition of Education. For a study of the government's fiscal situation, what it owes, what it is borrowing, and who is paying the taxes, you would do well to head to the T section (Treasury). This is where you would go to find the publications of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) including the Statistics of Income, to see who is paying taxes, who is taking advantages of certain tax loopholes, and how many individuals earned more than a million dollars last year. Finally, for financial data, you should try the publications of the Federal Reserve System. The Board of Governors publishes monthly, The Federal Reserve Bulletin, which contains data on a wide array of financial indicators including credit, debt, money supply, and interest rates. These data are complimented by research conducted and data compiled by the 12 regional Reserve Banks. In New England for example, the Boston FED maintains an on-line data base and publishes bi-monthly the New England Economic Review which includes articles written by its research department.

Often times, however, you may not need the primary data sources. There are many instances when the data is readily available in some easily accessible secondary sources. In the next section I will briefly describe some of these valuable secondary sources.

Invaluable Secondary Sources

For data on a wide array of indicators of the economic performance of the US economy, the statistics that you will be discussing in your economics courses, there are a few invaluable data sources. The most important of these for the non professional economist, which means all of you, are listed below.

In my view the three most important to you are the Statistical Abstract , Economic Report of the President and Business Statistics, and Economic Indicators and the Survey of Current Business. The Statistical Abstract is similar to an Almanac. It contains countless tables of data on a wide array of topics, not all of which are closely related to economics. I would recommend that every student have a copy of this book on their reference shelf. Once you have it, you will use it in this and many of your other courses for your papers and as a general reference. In addition to the numerous tables of recent annual data, the book contains information on the primary sources to allow for a more detailed study of the subject. This will help you in your detective work as you hunt down information on any particular topic.

The Economic Report of the President is also a very valuable data source. At the back of the report are tables containing annual data since 1948 on a large number of economic aggregates. This is about the best place to find a consistent set of time-series data. You will find, much to your dismay, that attempts to piece together a long time-series from smaller time-series will leave you with many different measures for any particular data point as a result of the government's policy of continually revising the data. If you are interested in quarterly or monthly data, then Business Statistics would be the place to look. Its contains data on a wide array of economic indicators but, the data are not timely and the more recent data must be obtained from other sources.

If you find yourself in need of timely data on the US economy, I would suggest the Commerce Department's, Survey of Current Business and the Council of Economic Advisors', Economic Indicators. These are monthly publication containing the most current data. In the first of these you will find the detailed breakdown of the National Income Account data on Gross Domestic Product and National Income, and periodic articles on a wide range of topics from personal income by state to foreign direct investment by country of origin and industry. Economic Indicators, meanwhile, offers a brief summary of the major macro variables for all the markets. It includes the current data plus a record of the data for the past 10 or so years.

Finally, I would also recommend two books by Norman Frumkin, Tracking America's Economy, and Guide to Economic Indicators, as well as one by Albert Sommers, The US Economy Demystified. These books examine in more detail than you are likely to need a vast number of economic aggregates, many of which we will not even discuss here. You can also see an expanded list of information sources.