Data for political economy students

A list of sources for (mainly) financial data
Author

Benjamin Braun

Primary official data sources

Most of the following official data sources can be accessed via DBnomics, a uniquely helpful, non-commercial economic data platform. The R package rdbnomics makes pulling data from different official sources in a standardised format incredibly efficient (see here). The Python library makes this even easier: The DBnomics website provides the code to download specific series.

Compiled datasets, official sources

Financial system

Sovereign debt

Holders of sovereign debt

Compiled datasets, academic researchers

Cross-border financial claims and flows

  • External wealth of nations database: Provides estimates of each country’s external financial assets and liabilities since 1970. Source: Lane and Milesi-Ferretti ().
  • Global capital allocation project: A methodology to restate global capital flow statistics from a residency to a nationality basis. The data unmasks issuance in tax havens and shows that flows from developed countries to emerging market are much larger than previously known. Source: Coppola et al. ().
  • World historical balance of payments database: Harmonizes BoP data across time and countries, enabling long-run comparative analysis of trade, capital flows, and foreign wealth accumulation. The database covers 100% of the world population and GDP throughout the period 1800-2025. Source: Nievas and Piketty ().

Wealth, asset prices, inequality

  • World Inequality Database: Aims to provide open and convenient access to the most extensive available database on the historical evolution of the world distribution of income and wealth, both within countries and between countries.
  • The GC Wealth Project: A platform aimed at expanding and consolidating access to the most up-to-date research and information on wealth, wealth inequalities, and wealth transfers and related tax policies, across countries and over time.

Historical macro

  • Macrohistory Database: The Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database is the result of an extensive historical data collection effort, by many people and over many years. Source: Jordà, Schularick, and Taylor ().
  • Global Macro Database: Combines data from 32 contemporary sources (e.g., IMF, World Bank, OECD) with 81 historical datasets for unparalleled coverage. Comes with dedicated Python and R packages. Source: Müller et al. ().

Sovereign borrowing and lending

Global financial safety net

  • IMF Monitor: Data on IMF activities, compiled and published by academic researchers and civil society. Source: Kentikelenis et al. ().
  • Global Financial Safety Net Tracker: Data on the total amount of financing to combat the COVID-19 crisis via IMF loans, regional financial arrangements (RFAs), and currency swaps; historical data on the annual lending capacity that a country can access in IMF, RFAs or central bank currency swaps.

Foreign lending by China

Other

  • IPE Data Resource: Provides a public good to the field by standardizing and merging together variables from 89 IPE data sources into a single dataset, increasing efficiency and reducing the risk of data management errors.

References

Coppola, Antonio, Matteo Maggiori, Brent Neiman, and Jesse Schreger. 2021. “Redrawing the Map of Global Capital Flows: The Role of Cross-Border Financing and Tax Havens.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 136 (3): 1499–1556. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjab014.
Dreher, Axel, Andreas Fuchs, Bradley Parks, Austin Strange, and Michael J. Tierney. 2022. Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China’s Overseas Development Program. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/banking-on-beijing/ED897623B19C117BAF39D219F9CF09FC.
Horn, Sebastian, Carmen M. Reinhart, and Christoph Trebesch. 2021. “China’s Overseas Lending.” Journal of International Economics 133: 103539. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.2021.103539.
Jordà, Òscar, Moritz Schularick, and Alan M. Taylor. 2017. “Macrofinancial History and the New Business Cycle Facts.” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 31 (1): 213–63.
Kentikelenis, Alexandros, Thomas Stubbs, Alexandros Kentikelenis, and Thomas Stubbs. 2023. A Thousand Cuts: Social Protection in the Age of Austerity. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Lane, Philip R., and Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti. 2018. “The External Wealth of Nations Revisited: International Financial Integration in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.” IMF Economic Review 66 (1): 189–222. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41308-017-0048-y.
Müller, Karsten, Chenzi Xu, Mohamed Lehbib, and Ziliang Chen. 2025. “The Global Macro Database: A New International Macroeconomic Dataset.” Available at SSRN 5121271.
Nievas, Gastón, and Thomas Piketty. n.d. “Unequal Exchange and North-South Relations: Evidence from Global Trade Flows and the World Balance of Payments 1800-2025.”