20 Sep 2010

European Data Bask

Economics 3 Comments

I am working on an op ed talking about fiscal austerity. I referred to the ECB’s June bulletin, which had listed several countries that improved their government debt position (through spending cuts) while experiencing even short-run economic growth.

The editor of Reuters wants to run the piece but asked me to give more specifics about the success stories, which the ECB bulletin–and even the paper it cites–doesn’t do.

I have looked at Eurostat but as far as I can tell, the data only go back to 2000.

Any ideas? At the very least, if I could get data (on GDP growth and government spending, by country) back to 1999, then I could focus on the Irish 2000 story. (Right now I can’t show how its spending changed, because I don’t have the 1999 base year.)

3 Responses to “European Data Bask”

  1. david (not henderson) says:
    at

    Canada in the 90s?

  2. MB says:
    at

    When in Eurostat database, for example http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=gov_a_main&lang=en choose ‘Time’ and ‘Select more elements’
    For some countries data is available since 1970s.