README.md

In meflynn/greenbook: Greenbook: Tools For Analyzing US Foreign Policy Spending Data

greenbook: Tools For Analyzing US Foreign Policy Spending Data

The goal of greenbook is to facilitate user access to spending data related to various aspects of US foreign policy. The name of the package is based on the annual State Department and Defense Department “greenbooks” that contain annual budgetary and spending data. Currently the package only includes data from the US State Department’s Overseas Loans and Grants greenbook, but I’ll be adding more DOD data as I get the chance.

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("meflynn/greenbook")

The package is still in development so you can plan on seeing some added features in the coming months. Eventually I’ll push a version to CRAN, too, but for now you’ll have to rely on the GitHub version

Example

This is a basic example of using the first function, greenbook_aid() to extract custom data on US economic and military aid.

library(greenbook)
#> Loading required package: data.table

aiddata <- greenbook_aid(type = "all", recipient = c(200, 645, 700), startyear = 1946, endyear = 2020, value = NULL, format = "long")

head(aiddata)
#>           country ccode iso3c year                       region category
#> 1: United Kingdom   200   GBR 1946               Western Europe Economic
#> 2: United Kingdom   200   GBR 1946               Western Europe Economic
#> 3: United Kingdom   200   GBR 1946               Western Europe Economic
#> 4:           Iraq   645   IRQ 1947 Middle East and North Africa Economic
#> 5: United Kingdom   200   GBR 1947               Western Europe Economic
#> 6: United Kingdom   200   GBR 1947               Western Europe Economic
#>               pubrow                         agency
#> 1: Inactive Programs     Department of the Treasury
#> 2: Inactive Programs Unknown - Historical Greenbook
#> 3: Inactive Programs Unknown - Historical Greenbook
#> 4: Inactive Programs Unknown - Historical Greenbook
#> 5: Inactive Programs     Department of the Treasury
#> 6: Inactive Programs Unknown - Historical Greenbook
#>                                         account    value aid_value
#> 1:                 INACTIVE - Lend Lease Silver constant     2e+08
#> 2:               INACTIVE - US Surplus Property constant   6.5e+08
#> 3: INACTIVE - UN Relif and Rehab Agency (UNRRA) constant   1.5e+07
#> 4:               INACTIVE - US Surplus Property constant   8732873
#> 5:                      INACTIVE - British Loan constant   3.6e+10
#> 6: INACTIVE - UN Relif and Rehab Agency (UNRRA) constant   6.8e+07

The function has several arguments to let users tailor the data to their needs. The recipient argument takes correlates of war (COW) numeric country codes or ISO3C character codes. You can supply single values or a vector of values.

the startyear and endyear arguments are required and determine the time span of the data. Currently the data go back to 1946 and up through 2020.

the value argument serves as a filter for historical dollar values (current) or inflation adjusted values (constant). Users can specify either or these, or leave the value argument out to return both values.

Finally, the format argument will return the data in long or wide format, with the only difference currently being whether or not the constant and current values are stacked or not. But there are other variables contained in the resulting data frame that users can use to further arrange the data according to their needs.

meflynn/greenbook documentation built on Dec. 21, 2021, 4:54 p.m.