ECONOMICS ON THE INTERNET

 A multitude of resources is available on the Internet relating to economics.  The resources can be used to learn the field of economics and as a source of data for economic analysis. This note contains information as of June 2000.  Addresses are revised and pages updated continuously, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the references after June 2000.

 This note also reflects the field I teach -- global political economy.  Although there are many sources relating to other fields in economics available on the Internet, I have not investigated them as thoroughly.  Finding additional sources is not difficult because of the links between sources.  Moreover, you may find unexpected treasures through serendipity.  I frequently rely on students for leads; they seem to have time and talent for finding resources I haven’t yet encountered.

WHERE TO START

Three comprehensive sites

 Here are two convenient, comprehensive starting points for economists on the Internet and a third site containing a glossary of economic terms.  These sites are so helpful that you’ll want to enter them as bookmarks.  I go to the first two frequently to begin searches for information.  They are updated frequently and many other economics sources are linked to them.

1. WebEc http://www.helsinki.fi/WebEc/

 This is one of the most comprehensive sites dealing with economics, containing references to sources of information, publications, discussion groups, jobs for economists and home pages maintained by professionals in the field.  The site is maintained by the Helsinki School of Economics in Finland and is mirrored in Japan, the US and the UK.

 WebEc has a category for Economics Data.  However, additional data can be found at sources listed under each of the fields of economics.  For example, under Regional Economics you can find data sources for Latin America, India, Russia and several other countries.

2. Resources for Economists on the Internet http://econwpa.wustl.edu/EconFAQ/EconFAQ.html

 Resources for Economists on the Internet is another comprehensive site listing numerous sources relating to economics.   Resources for Economists on the Internet has several categories for economic data -- U.S. Macro and Regional Data, Other U.S. Data, World and Non-U.S. Data, and Finance and Financial Markets.  Nested in these sources are links to other comprehensive sources of data.

3. AmosWeb  http://www.amosweb.com/

 AmosWeb is evolving into a comprehensive economics site oriented toward users of economic information. AmosWeb is very helpful if you need to define an economics term because it has a glossary, Gloss*arama, that defines terms and links to related terms.  Whenever you have a question about a term or concept in economics, look it up here.

GLOBAL ORGANIZATIONS

 The World Bank http://www.worldbank.org/ maintains a home page relevant to many of the bank’s activities -- publications, job openings, country analyses.  For example, to obtain the most recent regional analysis of Asia or country report on China, click on “Regions and Countries” at the home page.  The analyses include discussion of economic and political factors and the Bank’s involvement in the country. Neither the World Bank nor the IMF makes available over the Internet their complete database of economic information; the data is available for purchase, however.

One helpful site at the World Bank is "Competitive Indicators” http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/psd/compete.nsf/, which provides a "collection of 49 indicators to quickly assess economic performance and the environment for competitive business development in a large number of countries. .... These indicators reveal aspects of competitiveness or the conditions for achieving competitiveness for firms and industries in a particular country."  Indicators are listed in 5 categories: overall performance, macro and market dynamism, financial dynamism, infrastructure and investment climate, and human resources.

 The International Monetary Fund http://www.imf.org/ also maintains a home page relevant to its activities.  Like the World Bank, the IMF site is oriented toward individuals desiring publications or information concerning the institution.  In some instances the “Country Info” page contains references to the central bank and finance minister for that country. Neither the World Bank nor the IMF makes available over the Internet their complete database of economic information; the data is available for purchase, however.

IMF Staff Country Reports are available from the IMF in hard-copy form for $15. However, the reports can be downloaded free of charge from the IMF website. To locate and download a report on Thailand, for example, do the following:

1. Go to the IMF website: http://www.imf.org/
2. Click on "Publications" on the left side of the page.
3. Use the "Search IMF Publications" feature:
Subject: Thailand
Series:  IMF Staff Country Reports
Click on "search"
4. The search yields several Thailand publications, including the most recent Staff Country Report and a Statistical Appendix.
5. Click on "Thailand - Selected Issues"
6. Click on "Full Text in PDF Format" (This will load the complete publication using the Adobe Acrobat reader.  These publications frequently are 80-100 pages long, so you may want to read it in Adobe Acrobat rather than printing it. The Statistical Appendices files are not as large.)

 The World Trade Organization http://www.wto.org/ home page contains summaries of its most recent decisions together with a history of GATT and international trade.  The site also contains data relating to international trade, including links to other sites containing trade data.

 The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development http://www.oecd.org/ home page provides an explanation and history of the agency, job openings and publications.  A selection of statistics is available on-line, but because of the organization's focus on developed countries, statistics are available mainly for those countries.

Three examples of statistics that are available using Adobe Acrobat are:
1. The 1999 edition of OECD in Figures: http://www.oecd.org/publications/figures/
2. A comprehensive data set of Euro Area Data: http://www.oecd.org/eco/data/euroset.htm
3. Monthly and quarterly statistics from Central and European Countries: http://www.oecd.org/std/DNM/index.htm

 The United Nations http://www.un.org offers selected social indicators on-line at no charge.  Other data, such as the Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, are available for a fee.

The United Nations has a university to train professionals to improve the quality of life in developing nations.  The World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United Nations University site http://www.wider.unu.edu/ publishes country studies that are available only for purchase and cannot yet be downloaded directly through the Internet.  If you are interested in a career with the United Nations or other civil service, click on “Vacancies”, then “Vacancy Announcements of the International Civil Service Commission”.

 Most people have never heard of the Bank for International Settlements http://www.bis.org/.  Be the first one on your block to find out what services it provides and to whom.

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

 Regional development banks were created to assist development in specific regions of the world.  These organizations contain varying amounts of statistics and information concerning policies in the countries of each region:

 The Inter-American Development Bank http://www.iadb.org/ offers reports, information and links concerning the Americas.  The data and country reports are available at no charge.  The links are primarily to news organizations and multinational institutions.

 The Asian Development Bank http://www.adb.org/ offers country reports, information and links concerning Asia.  The country reports are available at no charge.

 The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development http://www.ebrd.org/ has very few statistics concerning Eastern European countries, but lists numerous publications. 

BUSINESS PERIODICALS

 It is easy to become up-to-date about economic and political events around the world through the Internet.  Although most business periodicals charge for access to their entire publication, many of them make available selected articles at no charge on the Internet.  Daily or weekly browsing through these helps the student become conversant with news events around the world.  Here are several important sources:

 The Economist http://www.economist.com/ offers a selection of articles from each issue over the Net and allows free registration to receive its weekly “Politics This Week” and “Business This Week” summaries.

 The March 13 1999 issue of The Economist included an interesting, one-page guide to "the best economic websites." The Economist polled ten top economists, and five "humble" journalists. The top five sites were selected according to (1) usefulness of information, (2) ease of use, and (3) appearance.  Here are the top five (two tied for 4th place):

1. Nouriel Roubini's website: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~nroubini/asia/AsiaHomepage.html
2. Paul Krugman's website: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www
3. National Bureau of Economic Research: http://www.nber.org/
4. Nicholas Economides' website: http://raven.stern.nyu.edu/networks
5. Hal Varian's Website: http://sims.berkeley.edu/resources/infoecon
6. The Mining company website: http://economics.miningco.com/money/economics/

Other interesting sites identified in the article were:

1. Website of economic book reviews, by Brad DeLong, UC Berkeley:
2. http://econ161.berkeley.edu/
3. OECD statistics website: http://www.oecd.org/std/others1.htm
4. Resources for Economists, by Bill Goffe: http://www.rfe.org/
5. Websites of Financial Publications:
 Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/
 Wall Street Journal: http://www.wsj.com/
 The Economist: http://www.economist.com/
6. Websites providing free investment research:
Merrill Lynch: http://www.merrilllynch.com/
Morgan Stanley: http://www.ms.com/gef.html
Jokes about Economists and Economics: http://www.etla.fi/pkm/JokEc/

 Financial Times http://www.ft.com/ allows free registration to receive its news articles and editorials.  The Financial Times is one of the world’s great business dailies.

 The Wall Street Journal http://wsj.com/ offers only its headlines at no charge.  To obtain a subscription to the daily WSJ or the Interactive Edition, one must pay a fee.

 Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/ offers selected articles, including its cover story, at no charge.  There are several additional services available for free.

 Asiaweek Home Page http://cnn.com/ASIANOW/asiaweek/ contains selected articles from the current and previous editions, together with statistics of economic conditions for a variety of countries.

Central Europe Review http://www.ce-review.org/ is a weekly online journal offering news and analysis of events in politics, society, and culture across the region.  In addition to regular columns and weekly news summaries, the journal contains several in-depth articles and special feature pieces, including a number of resources (such as articles, film and book reviews, and related links) grouped around a weekly theme. Users can read the "Central Europe Review" at the site or receive free weekly summaries via email.

 Magyar Net http://www.magyarnet.com/index_eng.html contains articles relating to Hungary.

WorldSkip http://www.worldskip.com/ is a commercial clearinghouse that draws together an array of links for almost every nation in the world. These are easily accessed through six regional pull-down menus.  Additional links to country profiles, maps, currency conversion, weather in selected cities, and translations (primarily European languages) are also provided. Be prepared for advertising!

Home Town Free Press http://www.hometownfreepress.com/index.htm has links to 1,500 news sources in the US and the world.  It is a commercial site, so be prepared for advertising.

Radio Free Europe http://www.rferl.org/ publishes summaries of news events in the central Europe and Newly-Independent States (NIS) regions.  The reports are updated on a regular basis, so provide current events with a US interpretation.  Click on “Reports” at the RFE home page.  The site also contains back issues of articles relating to CEE/NIS countries, so is a good way of learning history of the region.

Global Newsstand http://www.mcs.com/~rchojnac/www/tgn.html lists newspapers from around the world, while Asia Newsstand http://www.nni.nikkei.co.jp/FR/AWG/stand.html is a listing of several newspapers throughout Asia.

It also will be worthwhile searching for newspapers and business periodicals from the country in which you’re interested.  Many have made complete editions or selected articles available over the Net, and full subscriptions are available for a fee.  As you might expect, most are in the native language, although many provide a choice between English and native tongue.  A convenient way to find these is through the Yahoo! http://yahoo.com search engine by clicking on: News and Media:Newspapers:Regional:Countries, then specifying the country you wish to search.

Non-Governmental Organizations

 International organizations such as the Red Cross, Médecins sans Frontières, Vaccines for Children International, and local/national non-governmental organization (NGOs) play an important role in any country.  The clearinghouse for NGOs on the Internet is Union of International Associations (UIA) at http://www.uia.org/.  You can log onto the site as a guest.

Other Sites

 A site oriented toward students of economics is Economicsearch.com
http://www.economicsearch.com/.  According to its advertising, “Economicsearch.com contains an extensive collection of links to the most useful and important economic data and analysis on the web.  In addition, Economicsearch.com offers both students and mid-career professionals a job center to facilitate the demand and supply sides of the economics labor market.  What's more, Economicsearch.com provides a unique on-line tutorial system that enables students to gain full access to the resources on the Internet.  Our tutorial system is designed such that it offers both general information on micro- and macroeconomics and specific tools and information that can accompany and augment popular textbooks.”

The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (a nonprofit autonomous agency of the European Union) maintains a site http://susdev.eurofound.ie/ relating to sustainable development – economic growth tempered with considerations for the environment and natural resources.  The site includes an extensive 'links' listing of ±300 organizations that are pioneering sustainable development.

EconDirectory http://www.inomics.com includes more than 1.300 links to economics information organized into 30 categories. The site is oriented more toward professional journals and practitioners than toward students, but does have a search engine that might be used to find topics relating to economics.

If you would like information concerning other countries’ barriers to trade of US exports, look at 2000 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers http://www.ustr.gov/reports/nte/2000/contents.html.  The document reports on US trade relations with 55 countries, from the Arab League to Zimbabwe; they can be viewed via Adobe Acrobat.  I don’t know of a document that lists US barriers to trade of other countries’ exports!

 If you would like to learn more about the history of economics, try one of these sites:
• Archives for the History of Economic Thought: http://melbecon.unimelb.edu.au/het/
• The History of Economic Thought: http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/index.htm
• European Society for the History of Economic Thought: http://www.kof.ethz.ch/tm/links.html

An interesting site is a compendium of search engines from around the world, and in various languages -- Search Engine Colossus http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/.

 The US Department of State publishes Country Reports on Economic Policy and Trade Practices gopher://gopher.umsl.edu:70/11/library/govdocs/crpt/.  Unfortunately, these country reports tend to be dated.  When I searched in June 2000 the latest report available for Argentina was from 1992.  Because the Department of State presents analysis only from the US perspective, it would be nice to have similar analyses from other countries.  I’m not aware that they exist, so if you find them please inform me.

 Library of Congress Country Studies http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cshome.html also are dated, despite their convenient presentation in HTML.  A June 2000 search on Haiti provided data from 1989, and Argentina wasn’t even listed in the index!

 CIA Publications and Handbooks http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/pubs.html publishes the World Fact Book http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html and the Handbook of International Economic Statistics http://www.odci.gov/cia/di/products/hies/index.html.  The site also has maps, flags and governmental officers for many countries.

 The Federal Web Locator http://www.infoctr.edu/fwl/ is a source link to web sites and servers maintained by the US government.  Start here to find anything relating to the US government.

   The US Department of Commerce provides links to international trade data at Globus & NTDB (National Trade Data Bank) http://www.stat-usa.gov/tradtest.nsf.

Sites relating to central banks and finance ministries

 The starting point for this search should be Mark Bernkopf's Central Banking Resource Center, which contains links to finance ministries and central banks around the world: http://patriot.net/~bernkopf/.  The site has addresses, telephone and fax numbers for central banks and ministries of finance or economics from Angola to Zambia; if the organization has a home page, a link to that home page is provided.

Central banks and finance ministries can be valuable sources of data about countries.  Central banks usually provide information relating to government securities, interest rates, money supply and inflation.  Finance ministries show the government’s budget (and sometimes the budget history) and discuss current economic conditions in each country.

 Three prominent sites for central banks are:

1. The United States Federal Reserve http://www.bog.frb.fed.us/, which provides links to each of the twelve district banks.  The site also contains the Fed’s beige book -- the discussion of current economic conditions in each of the districts -- and testimonies and speeches by Fed officials. A very useful link is to FRED at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis http://www.stls.frb.org/, which has a database of statistics for the United States going back decades.  FRED is listed under Economic Research. Although most of the data is oriented toward the United States, some of the data deals with international economic indicators.  Much of the data is in ASCII form that can be copied onto your computer’s clipboard, then pasted onto your working page.
2. The Deutsche Bundesbank http://www.bundesbank.de/index_e.html is Germany’s central bank. Contrast the missions of the German and US central banks -- the Bundesbank focuses on protecting the internal and external value of the euro, while the Fed focuses on full employment in an environment of monetary stability.  This point helps reveal that institutions operate in an environment dictated by the history of that country.
3. The Bank of England http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/.  Because the UK did not join the European Monetary Union, the Bank of England continues to maintain policies independently of the rest of Europe.  It was recently granted independence from the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Three typical treasury sites are:

1. The United States Department of the Treasury http://www.treas.gov/ provides links to several relevant sites such as the public debt, which is fundamental for understanding the Treasury securities market;
2. France Trésor http://www.francetresor.gouv.fr/, a page of the Ministére de Finance of France and one of the rapidly-developing securities markets;
3. Her Majesty’s Treasury http://www.hm treasury.gov.uk/, the home page of the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the United Kingdom.

Foreign exchange

 The Internet permits real-time investigation of currency values through several sites, such as Olsen & Associates Currency Converter http://www.oanda.com, which shows values for 164 currencies beginning in 1990 and up to the previous day.

 The Chicago Mercantile Exchange site contains a quiz relating to currency trading, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Foreign Currency Aptitude Test http://www.cme.com/market/cfot/quiz/.  The CME also offers a currency trading simulation, the Currency Trading Simulation http://www.cme.com/market/cfot/simulation/.

Simulations and models

 If you would like to practice making decisions relating to economics you can try one of these simulations.  While simulations are instructive, they usually  require some time to learn the rules.

 The National Budget Simulation http://garnet.berkeley.edu:3333/budget/budget.html allows the user to reduce the US federal budget deficit through a series of tax increases or expenditure decreases.

 FAIRMODEL http://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu/ is a more complex econometric model for conducting either a domestic or multicountry simulation.  The site contains several chapters of the text from which the model is derived.

 GTAP: The Global Trade Analysis Project http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/gtap/index.htm is a model relating to international trade.  Although I haven’t tried the simulation, the guide says that it is sophisticated and computationally complex.

 Iowa Electronic Markets http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/index.html is a real-time, real money futures market featuring a variety of products.  For example, you can purchase futures in the US presidential election, where the value of each contract depends on the prospects of the candidate.

 Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/ has an Economics Challenge that is fun to conduct with the class in real time, and a CPI calculator that computes the current value of an item purchased in a previous year.

Online Textbooks

 Just as Napster has made music available free online, textbooks are being published online.  Some examples of books or libraries are:
Essential Principles of Economics: A Hypermedia Text
 http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/prin/txt/EcoToC.html
ConnecText Catalog: A Registry of Online Textbooks http://www.connectext.com/.  You can check this page to what is available without charge at the moment:
http://www.connectext.com/index1b.htm
The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania Library lists thousands of classics that are available through Adobe Acrobat or HTML: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/