Economic Data (updated 2005)

It includes multiple measures of income levels, and variables concerning national accounts, money and trade. Since different measures are used in different ways by researchers, the choice whether to include a variable in the economc.dta or politicl.dta was oftentimes quite subjective.

We have chosen for example to treat inflation as an economic indicator rather than a policy variable and to treat government consumption as a policy variable. Other economic variables which contain information on policy such as tax rates, and government revenue and expenditure can be found in the political data set, politicl.dta. The variables from the two sets can easily be merged.