Friday, October 24, 2008

New OECD Interface and Expanded Content!






The new OECD interface, OECD.Stat Extracts, makes it easier to download large amounts of international data into Excel! This database now includes most of the OECD data in one data warehouse, including OECD Health Data, previously provided by the library on CD ROM.

Search by keyword or topics such as demographics, economic indicators, education, environment, health, industry and services, prices and purchasing parity, social and welfare, and more. You can also request regional and country statistical profiles.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

OECD Spotlight on Statistics

A new feature of OECD news spotlights timely statistics of topical interest:

Rich man, poor man
posted Wednesday, October 22, 2008 5:09 PM

"Income inequality grew in most OECD countries between the mid 1980s and the mid 2000s. On average the income of the richest 10 percent of the population is now almost nine times higher than the poorest 10 percent. In Denmark and Sweden the gap is narrower with the richest 10% earning on average less than five times the poorest.

Only a few countries bucked the trend: France, Greece and Spain moved towards greater equality of incomes over the past 20 years.

The United States has one of the highest levels of inequality with the average earnings of the richest 10 % of the population 16 times higher than the poorest 10 percent. The gap between rich and poor in the US has also widened more rapidly than in most other countries over the past 20 years."

Monday, October 6, 2008

Secondary Research Data Resources at BC


October 23, 2008 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm, Gasson 9 Boston College offers many sources and repositories of data for secondary research in the social sciences, education, nursing, economics, business and other disciplines. This workshop is particularly geared to researchers who need to access, analyze and manipulate data from BC's subscription data repositories. This tutorial will help you: find the data you need for your research or class project; learn about the Boston College collection of data resources in the Statistical Data Catalog; and how to download the data onto your desktop, including how to import into quantitative analytical tools such as SPSS. Get a tour of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, a data archive that includes over 5,000 datasets. We will also discuss the library’s guides to key Business, Economics, Education, Health, and General U.S. and cross-national data sources. Topics may be customized based on attendees’ research interests.

Co-instructors: Rani Dalgin, ITS Research Services and Barbara Mento, Data/GIS Librarian To sign up for a tutorial, please send email to researchservices@bc.edu with the name of the tutorial.