In mingjerli/IMFData: R Interface for International Monetary Fund(IMF) Data API

IMFData

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  fig.path = "README-"
)

IMFData is an R package to access IMF (Internation Monetary Fund) data . It has three main goals:

Find out available datasets in the API.
Find out the dataset datastructure and code to use to make a query.
Query through the API.

Installation

Right now, you can install

from CRAN with

install.packages('IMFData')

the latest development version from github with

devtools::install_github('mingjerli/IMFData')

Loading the package

library(IMFData)

How to use IMFData

If you don't know anything about IMF data API, the following four steps is a good way to start.

Find out available dataset in IMF data.

availableDB <- DataflowMethod()
availableDB$DatabaseID
availableDB$DatabaseText

Findout how many dimensions are available in a given dataset. Here, we use IFS(International Financial Statistics) for example,

# Get dimension code of IFS dataset
IFS.available.codes <- DataStructureMethod('IFS')
# Available dimension code
names(IFS.available.codes)
# Possible code in the first dimension
IFS.available.codes[[1]]

Search possible code to use in each dimension. Here, we want to search code related to GDP in CL_INDICATOR_IFS dimension,

# Search code contains GDP
CodeSearch(IFS.available.codes, 'CL_INDICATOR_IFS', 'GDP')

Make API call to get data

databaseID <- 'IFS'
startdate='2001-01-01'
enddate='2016-12-31'
checkquery = FALSE

## Germany, Norminal GDP in Euros, Norminal GDP in National Currency
queryfilter <- list(CL_FREA="", CL_AREA_IFS="GR", CL_INDICATOR_IFS =c("NGDP_EUR","NGDP_XDC"))
GR.NGDP.query <- CompactDataMethod(databaseID, queryfilter, startdate, enddate, checkquery)
GR.NGDP.query[,1:5]
GR.NGDP.query$Obs[[1]]
GR.NGDP.query$Obs[[2]]

## Quarterly, US, NGDP_SA_AR_XDC
queryfilter <- list(CL_FREA="Q", CL_AREA_IFS="US", CL_INDICATOR_IFS ="NGDP_SA_AR_XDC")
Q.US.NGDP.query <- CompactDataMethod(databaseID, queryfilter, startdate, enddate, checkquery)
Q.US.NGDP.query[,1:5]
Q.US.NGDP.query$Obs[[1]]

## See exact API call to the data source
CompactDataMethod(databaseID, queryfilter, startdate, enddate, checkquery, verbose=TRUE)$Obs[[1]]

## Return a simple data frame
head(CompactDataMethod(databaseID, queryfilter, startdate, enddate, checkquery, tidy=TRUE))