Abstract:
Several times a year, the Statistics Department of the International Monetary Funds publishes the International Financial Statistics (IFS) database and makes the CD-ROM available to its subscribers. The International Financial Statistics is a standard source of international statistics on all aspects of international and domestic finance. It provides users with time series data of major economic aggregates used in economic analysis. The IFS reports, for most countries of the world, current data needed in the analysis of problems of international payments and of inflation and deflation, i.e., data on exchange rates, international liquidity, international banking, money and banking, interest rates, prices, production, international transactions, government accounts, and national accounts. The latest version of IFS is installed on all EDS machines. It contains data from 1945 until the latest current month data has been released for (there is usually about a 2 month lag time), and it also incorporates a Windows-based browser for users who prefer to access the database through an interactive interface.
This document briefly shows you how to extract data from the IFS at Electronic Data Service. (Note: IFS is also available in the Business and Economics Library)
Getting Started
- Create your workspace as a folder within the My Documents folder.
- The IFS program is found in the Start Menu under pPrograms -> EDS -> Fincial Data -> IFS Browser.
To successfully extract a dataset from the IFS, you have to go through the following steps.
- Identifying the countries and time series topics and selecting the retrieval period.
- Selecting and retrieving the time series data that you wish to download from the IFS database.
- Modifying the IFS output in the data viewer as necessary and saving it to a file.
Step 1: Identifying the Countries and Time Series Topics
To identify the countries and time series topics, you may either browse or search the IFS database.
Browsing the IFS database
The IFS directory tree provides four complementary views for browsing the database. You can double click any of these directories to expand it.
- The Country Tables View provides access to time series for a particular country through a collection of tables that correspond to the country pages in the monthly IFS publication.
- The World Tables entry represents roughly two dozen of the World and Area Tables that appear in the front of the monthly IFS publication.
- There are two tables associated with the Commodity Prices. The first table represents data that are the market prices reported on the country pages for important commodities traded internationally, in units of quantity frequently used in the respective commodity markets, expressed in U.S. dollars. The second table represents the same data expressed as indices.
- The Economic Concept View allows the retrieval of similar concepts across a number of countries, to the extent that they exist. Due to differences in the way countries define and compile statistics, not all concepts are fully comparable across all countries.
For example, if you want to find official exchange rates for the Thai currency (baht per U.S. dollar), you can double click Country Tables. A list of available countries will appear in the country selection box. Find and click on Thailand. A list of all available tables will then appear in the table selection box. Look for Exchange Rates and select the item(s) you wish to retrieve from the database.
You can also double click World Tables. A list of folders will appear below it. Click Exchange Rates. A list of available currencies will appear in the table selection box. You will find Thai baht listed among Asian currencies.
Alternatively, you can click on Economic Concept View, select Country Exchange Rates, National Currency per US dollar, and then click Thailand in the country selection box. Click on the item(s) you wish to download.
Searching the IFS Database Using Time Series Codes
- Click on the Search Tab. The Search screen will appear.
- Enter desired strings including wildcards in time series key sub-fields, according to Naming Conventions for IFS Time Series or select the desired country, subject, and/or partner country from the drop-down list.
For example, you can either select Thailand from the pull down menu or type in "578," the corresponding country code for Thailand in the country code selection box. Type "Official Exchange Rates" in the subject selection box.
- Click on Search button to return list of time series matching wildcard specification.
- Select the desired series within the list of found series
- Click on Add to add the series to the Series to Retrieve box on the Browse tab.
By default, the frequency and retrieval period of data observations is set to "Annual(A) from 1989 to 1998."
To change the frequency or period of data observations that are to be retrieved, click on the Retrieval Period setting area in the upper left corner of the Browser tab. The dialog box that appears contains fields for single or multiple frequency settings, frequency, start period and year, and end period and year.
To select a retrieval period containing dates of only a single frequency, make sure the Single Frequency setting is selected, select the desired frequency, and then adjust start and end periods and years accordingly. Valid frequencies include annual, quarterly, and monthly.
To select a retrieval period containing dates of more than one frequency, click on the Multiple Frequency setting. The retrieval period dialog will expand to include additional boxes for specifying the order of the dates and to display the period setting for each frequency.
For each frequency of dates to be included in the retrieval period, select the desired frequency, start and end period and years as above and click on the Add button. The Freq. Order setting determines whether dates will be arrayed from Low to High frequency (e.g., annual, quarterly, and monthly) or High to Low (e.g., monthly, quarterly, and annual). By default, dates are arranged by frequency, starting with the lowest frequency, e.g. annual.
Step 2: Selecting and Retrieving the Time Series Data
Once the desired economic concepts and/or countries have been highlighted in the upper right selection box(es), you may select the individual series by clicking on the Add button. This will add the selected series to the Series to Retrieve box in the lower right portion of the screen. These series may be combined with series from another desired entry in the tree directory, by making selections and pressing the Add button in the same way as for the initial selection.
Once all the desired series have been selected and placed in the Series to Retrieve Box, all the series in the Series to Retrieve box may be transferred to the spreadsheet by clicking on the Retrieve button. This will create a table in the spreadsheet in accordance with the options that are set on the Options Tab.
The output table, based on the browser interface selections and options, is displayed using a spreadsheet product called Formula One. Formula One is very similar to Microsoft Excel 97 in appearance but has limited capabilities. Simple operations can be performed on the spreadsheet, i.e., summation, inserting and deleting rows and columns, cell formatting, copying and pasting cells, and saving the Formula One sheet(s) as an Excel workbook, etc. [Note: when performing data movement operations, the display of cell footnotes is discontinued. Another data retrieval must be performed to re-activate the display of footnotes.] For certain topical areas, such as balance of payments and government finance statistics, the table frames (e.g., country pages) include the full list of possible concepts for the topic. This does not mean that all concepts listed in the table exist for every country. When a table is retrieved, there may be rows for which only the time series code and table descriptor exist; this means that the time series does not exist for the country selected.
To facilitate your statistical analysis, you may want to specify your preferences in the Option Tab.
Clicking on the IFS Browser on the Start bar at the bottom of the screen will bring back the IFS browse screen. Click on the Option tab and you will see a list of options available in extracting IFS data.
Changing Output Orientation
The default output orientation for retrieved data is to place the requested dates and the data for each time series in a row. Instead, to place the requested dates and data for each time series in a column, check the Transposed box under Output Orientation. While this box is checked, clicking on the Retrieve button will cause a transposed table to be created. Note that the Transposed option has no effect when retrieving an entire table using the Retrieve Table button on the Browse Tab. When more than 256 time series are requested with a transposed orientation, because of spreadsheet’s limit of 256 columns in a single sheet, the first 256 series will be placed in the first sheet, with the remaining series placed in one or more other sheets, as necessary.
Scaling Observation Values
The scaling of observations to be retrieved in the spreadsheet may be adjusted by selecting the desired choice within the Scale Option box. This allows data values retrieved to be stored and displayed with a common magnitude, e.g., units, thousands, millions, billions or trillions. No scaling is applied to the observation values of series that are identified as index numbers, growth rates, percent changes, etc. If no scale option is specified in the Scale Options box, then by default, the magnitude of the series as specified in the underlying IFS database will generally determine the scaling that is applied to the observation values (Format as in Database option). The only exception to this is when an IFS Country Table is retrieved by clicking on the Retrieve Table button. In this case, the Format as in Database scaling option will result in observations for each time series being scaled according to the magnitude stored with the country table presentation, if different from that stored with the time series in the database.
Step 3: Modifying and Saving the IFS Output
You may want to modify the IFS output before saving it. Using the same techniques as in Microsoft Excel, you can delete unnecessary rows or columns and/or make any adjustments to the IFS output table.
You can also save the output file by clicking on File, and then choose Save As on the drop down menu or simply by clicking the diskette icon on the menu bar.
You will have the option to save your output file as a Microsoft Excel (.xls), Formula One, or Tab Delimited Text (.txt) formats.
Save the data to the folder you created in D:\MyDocs\.
Excel format files can be read by SPSS and Stata or converted to another format using StatTranser which is available in EDS.
