Introduction to the Macrodata Online Browser on the MZES Homepage

You want to compute fertility rates for Italy, Spain and Germany, employment and unemployment figures and other labour market indicators for your paper. What is the quickest way getting this information? Today, an incredible amount of statistical data from almost every source of official Statistics is available via the Internet and can be selected interactively. Most Central Statistical Offices (CSO) offer interactive websites with their products: starting with single figures, multilayer tables, time-series and PDF-documents. The researcher nowadays does not always need to order statistical sheets in print any more or search the library for statistical yearbooks to get recent as well as historic key figures about the countries he is about to analyze for his publications. Further on, many modern statistical techniques, such as Log-Linear Modelling or Time Series Analysis only need aggregate tables of data as a source for further investigation. This is valid as well, if you are trying to use hierarchical modelling: You need aggregate figures on higher level that you can match to your data.
This website is a rough guide to online data resources containing a keyword list (not a thesaurus), descriptions and other useful information on interactive sites provided by CSOs and international organizations worldwide. To use this site, you only need to:

1. type in a keyword of the broad thematic area you are interested in, such as labour market, employment, housing, public spending...
2. select the country or several countries you would like to find figures about...
3. select if you would like to have time series or rather results of the latest macro-census and
4. confirm your search

You get a list of websites by country, containing at least some information on the topics of your choice and a very brief description of the website to guide you along to use the website.
If you want more information on one of the sites in your list, just click on the hyperlink to retrieve the detailed information with descriptions and the contents of the website. You’ll also get some particularities, retrieval modes and the nature of downloads you can make from the page you have selected. If you think you can find the needed information on a selected website, just choose the link button and you leave the MZES website for the statistical information website. You can also refer to the Glossary on this website, to find the definitions of statistical termini in different languages (not ready yet). For instance, if you are looking for gross domestic product but the website is only in French and Dutch, you can check the corresponding term in our Glossary in French at least.

For further Interest, the Vade Mecum offers you some of the most useful indices used in statistics if you want to compare countries in terms of population growth rates, Fertility rates or Dependency quotas. The Vade Mecum gives you a definition of the measures (indices) and the formula used to calculate them. This is very useful, if you want to compute some descriptive figures on a selection of countries. You should, though, always be careful in using the figures published by the CSO's and check at least for the source of their data and their methods and definitions, which are usually provided with the data or in a special section on nomenclatures.
Programs suitable for the in depth analysis of multilayer tables or time series are available at no cost from the Internet. Among many others, the following software can be used for further analyses:

LEM (free download)
http://www.uvt.nl/faculteiten/fsw/organisatie/departementen/mto/software2.html

“R” (free download)
http://www.r-project.org/