14 Datasets for Economics to Help Find and Use Data for Powerful Insights

Why is inflation rising? What drives wage stagnation or housing booms? These are complex questions, but datasets for economics can help uncover the patterns beneath the surface.

Today, data science is essential to economic research, policymaking, and business strategy. With the right datasets, data scientists and analysts can model economies, predict financial trends, and evaluate government interventions with precision.

This blog introduces some of the best sources for economic data, spanning curated platforms like Kaggle and Hugging Face to institutional repositories like FRED and the World Bank. Whether you’re a student, an aspiring data scientist, or a seasoned economist, these resources will help you uncover new insights.

Why Economic Datasets Matter

Economic data provides a lens into how societies function. These datasets help address real-world challenges:

• Policy Impact: Evaluate the effectiveness of fiscal or monetary policies.
• Market Behavior: Understand movements in housing, labor, and commodity markets.
• Global Development: Track country-level indicators like poverty, education, or debt.
• Business Decisions: Guide investments, forecasts, and risk assessments.

Working with economic datasets also sharpens your technical skills — especially time-series analysis, regression modeling, and data visualization — while deepening your understanding of economics.

Kaggle: Crowdsourced Economic Insights

Kaggle is well-known for data science competitions, but its dataset repository is a goldmine for economic analysis. What sets Kaggle apart is its community-driven approach — many datasets come with notebooks, charts, and forums that add depth.

Notable Datasets:

• Finance & Economics Dataset (2000–Present): Combines macroeconomic indicators, stock prices, and currency rates. Ideal for building forecasting models or studying market reactions to events.
• Global Economic Indicators (2010–2023): Offers data on GDP, inflation, employment, and trade for dozens of countries — perfect for comparative studies.
• Zillow Economics Data: This dataset captures U.S. housing prices by ZIP code. It’s widely used in real estate forecasting, rent affordability analysis, and regional economic health.

Kaggle also maintains an economics topic page, allowing users to browse hundreds of related datasets with peer-reviewed insights.

Hugging Face: Text Meets Economics

While Hugging Face is primarily associated with natural language processing, its Datasets Hub has become a valuable resource for economic researchers looking to combine quantitative and qualitative data.

Standout Datasets:

• Anthropic/EconomicIndex: Tracks how developments in AI and large language models affect economic activity. Useful for studying the intersection of tech innovation and macroeconomics.
• Sentiment Economy News: A unique dataset containing sentiment-labeled news articles on economic topics. Enables sentiment-driven analysis of market or policy narratives.
• Dataforge-Economics: A resource built to train models in economic literacy, offering definitions, concepts, and structured insights for educational or modeling use.

For text-based economic analysis, such as understanding how media influences markets, Hugging Face offers datasets that go beyond traditional spreadsheets.

FRED: The Standard for U.S. Time Series

The Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) system, maintained by the St. Louis Fed, is one of the most trusted sources for U.S. economic data. It houses over 800,000 time-series datasets across a range of topics.

Key Features:

• High-frequency updates on inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and GDP.
• Integration with Excel, Python (fredapi), and R.
• Reliable for long-term economic modeling and academic research.

World Bank Open Data: A Global Perspective

World Bank Open Data provides economic, demographic, and development indicators across 200+ countries. It’s particularly valuable for analyzing global trends over time.

Example Uses:

• Measuring income inequality with Gini indices.
• Assessing healthcare or education spending across regions.
• Comparing climate-related economic metrics.

The data is highly standardized, which simplifies cross-country analysis.

IMF Data: Global Finance and Forecasting

The International Monetary Fund offers data on financial stability, government budgets, and global economic forecasts.

Popular Resources:

• World Economic Outlook (WEO): Forecasts and trends.
• International Financial Statistics (IFS): Exchange rates, reserves, and capital flows.

IMF datasets for economics are critical for modeling emerging market dynamics or simulating macroeconomic shocks.

BEA and BLS: U.S. Production and Labor

Two key U.S. government datasets for economics offer granular insights:

BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis): Measures GDP, consumer spending, and trade balances.

BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics): Tracks employment, wages, inflation (CPI), and productivity.

These datasets are foundational for any analysis involving domestic economic conditions.

Additional Discovery Tools

Google Dataset Search: Aggregates datasets across platforms and universities.

Data.gov: The U.S. government’s central open-data portal.

Our World in Data: Research-backed datasets on global issues — poverty, energy, climate, and more.

These portals are ideal for exploring niche datasets or building custom data pipelines.

Conclusion: Equip Yourself with the Right Data Using These Datasets for Economics

Economic insights start with access to quality data. From Kaggle’s user-friendly collections to FRED’s authoritative time series and Hugging Face’s textual depth, there’s no shortage of rich resources available.

Use these datasets for economics to deepen your economic understanding, support your data science work, or just explore the forces shaping the global economy. The right dataset can reveal more than trends — it can unlock entire stories.