Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

For all of you who are big statistics fans out there, one of the nice sources for economic data is the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). I haven't done an explanation of a what an international organization does in an embarrassingly long time, so today I am going to make up for that.

The OECD is made up of thirty countries, representing the largest economies in the world. Their purpose is to "support sustainable economic growth, boost employment, raise living standards, maintain financial stability, assist other countries' economic development, and contribute to growth in world trade" (from the about page).

So what? Well, what this means is they gather data and statistics on all of these things and report that information out to the rest of the world. They right in-depth reports and provide access to a variety of databases. Now if you are here on Boulder's campus we have access to their nice subscription database SourceOECD, but if you are not a student don't despair. The library has a guide linking to a variety of free sources of information from this group.

While the main focus of the OECD work is on the developed world, they do developing countries research and for a sample of that, check out the African Economic Outlook for 2008 for free online.