What is the best API for up to date national economic statistics?

Hi there, I am working on an initiative called factmata (factmata.com). The aim is that given a particular claim e.g. “US unemployment is skyrocketting”, we want to build a tool for users to be able to view a chart, graph or figure from best official source for this on the page via a Chrome extension.

Our original source of data was the World Bank databank, but this we have realised has only annual statistics and stopped updating in 2014 for most statistics. Thus, if a user is checking a statement like “unemployment is at 6%” on Twitter, seeing a chart of a figure that stopped in 2014 isn’t very helpful.

Thus, what is the most up to date source of national statistics? Else, if we can’t directly interface with an API, how can we trigger a web search amongst a portal of up to date national statistics (one site for all countries), else even have a whitelist of relevant URLs for each countries statistics (non-aggregated, country by country, site by site). I am also looking at Statista and Knoema and tradingeconomics.com.

1 Like

Hi @ghulatid! Are you looking primarily for US data or international?

1 Like

International! But most of our users will be US or Europe so we can compromise perhaps…

1 Like

For US data try:

For Europe and international data try:

Hope this helps!

3 Likes

Check out OpenKAPSARC https://datasource.kapsarc.org Every dataset is consumable via API. Focus regions are GCC, India and China.

Dataset themes include
Crude Oil & Refined Products, Natural Gas, Coal, Renewable & Alternative Fuels, Nuclear, Electricity, Water, Transportation, Industry, Residential, Agriculture, Environment, Economy, Demography, Trade and Policies.

Check out Data & Tools - KAPSARC for more energy and economics open models and tools for advancing research.

3 Likes

I just came across this company:

They seem to have done the job of everyone since 2011 and gathered all the world’s economic statistics! Had never heard of them. Anyone used them or have any experience with Knoema?

Hi @ghulatid, I’m building NumHub a community driven statistics database. Are you still looking for the API? Would love to chat, my email is username at domain.

Hi @ghulatid I really agree this is an issue. We (myself and colleagues at Open Knowledge, Datopian and Viderum) been working on curating up-to-date data for people at the DataHub https://datahub.io/ over many years. Recently we’ve been putting quite a bit of effort into this especially in the collections section: Dataset Collections - DataHub - Frictionless Data which may be relevant for your needs.

1 Like

@andrey are you aware of https://datahub.io/? It looks like DataHub and NumHub have a lot in common and it would be worth chatting. Best way to chat would be on gitter at datahubio/chat - Gitter

Hi ghulatid, have you tried unibit.ai? there’re more than 500,000 macroeconomic indicators that you can request. The indicators are indexed in the pretty simple-to-use search bar