Grants:IdeaLab/Global Economic Map

status: idea

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project:

Global Economic Map

idea creator:

Alex Peek

project contact:

Mcnabber091 (talk) 05:31, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

participants:

join this idea!

Alex Peek

summary:

Essential economic data for monitoring an economy

created on: 05:31, 26 August 2013

Project idea: Global Economic Map

New hopepage: Econ Factbook

The Global Economic Map is a collection of standardized data sets of economic statistics that can be applied to every country, region and city in the world. The goal to create the basic structure of the economy. Data is from a collection of government publications, SEC filings and other professional sources. This project will be fully integrated into Wikidata.

To understand what the project will look like, please check out the articles listed below:

1. United States ($14,991 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economy_of_the_United_States

2. China ($7,321 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economy_of_China

3. Japan ($5,959 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economy_of_Japan

4. Germany ($3,399 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economy_of_Germany

5. France ($2,779 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economy_of_France

6. Brazil ($2,476 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economy_of_Brazil

7. United Kingdom ($2,444 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economy_of_the_United_Kingdom

8. Italy ($2,192 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economic_summary_of_Italy

9. Russia ($1,899 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economic_summary_of_Russia

10. India ($1,872 billion):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mcnabber091/Economic_summary_of_India

List of country articles: en:User:Mcnabber091/sandbox/Country articles

Lists of regional articles: en:User:Mcnabber091/sandbox/Regional lists (all 50 U.S. states completed)

Lists of city articles: en:User:Mcnabber091/sandbox/City lists

Academic support

"This project provides a valuable one-stop source of freely-available data for a large number of countries as well as for regions and cities. These data should be of use to researchers, teachers, and students. So far, the project appears to be well-managed and the diversity of the list of contributors is impressive."

- Paul Storer, Professor of Economics at the Western Washington University

"This project would be useful additional resource as it would bring together data that people could also find themselves by an appropriate search, therefore saving some time."

- Panu Poutvaara, Professor of Economics at the University of Munich and Head of the Department of International Institutional Comparisons at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research

Wikimedia Support

Support Ratburntro44 (talk) 01:36, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
Support Psychoslave (talk) 15:54, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
Support Faedrus2 (talk) 05:26, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
Support Pcourtney (talk) 11:06, 14 April 2013 (UTC)
Support Husky2013 (talk) 05:42, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
Support AliasCummings (talk) 14:57, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
Support Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:40, 25 June 2013 (UTC) This project should be considered. I am sure this project will have to run eventually and now might be time to start.
Support Yawnbox (talk) 03:26, 2 July 2013 (UTC)
Support Filceolaire (talk) 20:57, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Support Danrok (talk) 21:07, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
Support aashaa (talk)--Aashaa (talk) 23:01, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
Support EllenCT (talk) 22:52, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
Support Mcnabber091 (talk) 05:13, 29 September 2013 (UTC) In the future everyone will know the GDP of their hometown.
Support Jmabel (talk) 18:04, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
Support Yug (talk) 17:33, 19 October 2013 (UTC) -- Wikimaps, Map workshop cartographer, D3js map maker. Economy rule the world. "Imagine a where each single human have free and clear access to the most relevant aspects of economy by area", that would make informed citizens, and better decisions.
Support Marcocalitri (talk) 20:24, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
Support Floorkoudijs (talk) 16:54, 1 June 2014 (UTC)
Support Ochilov (talk) 13:24, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Format and economic statistics

There are eleven sections in the data set and all section are connected.

1. Summary: Total GDP, GDP per capita, Population, GDP growth rate

Source: World Bank Indicators: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator

This first section provides the most fundamental statistics about an economy in a short summary.

2. GDP by region: GDP by region, GDP per capita by region, Population by region

This section depicts the structure of an economy by showing GDP broken down to a more local level. This can show income differences.

3. Cities by GDP: City GDP, City population

The city section shows most local component of the economy. Cities are the major producers of GDP.

4. Industries by GDP

Source: IMF Data and Statistics http://www.imf.org/external/data.htm

To provide more qualitative factors about an economy, GDP by industry is provided. This shows which industries are most active and produce the most most GDP.

5. Employment by Industry

Source: International Labor Organization http://laborsta.ilo.org/

This table shows which industries have the most workers. When viewed alongside other tables one can speculate the salaries of workers in each industry.

6. Consumers: Assets, Debt, Income, Expenditures, GINI coefficient

This section depicts the nature of consumers in terms of net worth, income and expenditures. Consumers are an important piece of the economy that should be monitored. This table is related to industry and employment tables. It is also related to the tax revenue of the government.

7. Corporations by revenue: Revenue, Profit, Assets, Debt Ratio, Headquarters, Employees

Corporations are the producers of private goods and services of the economy. This section gives a depiction of the largest companies and their current financial situation. This table is related to GDP and employment by industry.

8. Fiscal Budget: Taxes by source and Expenditures by department, Debt

Government finances are an important piece of the economy. Tax sources and expenditure are shown. This can be useful for an evaluating fiscal strategy and improving transparency.

9. Monetary Policy: Monetary base (M2), Foreign exchange reserves, Interest rate, Inflation rate

This section is designed to provide the most important statistics for monetary policy. The balance sheet of the central bank is included because it is the most central aspect of the financial system. All financial entities in the economy are connected to the balance sheet of the central bank. Inflation, foreign exchange reserves and interest rates are also included in this section.

10. Banks by assets: Assets, Profit, Headquarters, Employees

This section provides further insight into the structure of the financial system showing the major financial institutions.

11. International Trade: Exports, Imports, Trade Deficit, Balance of Payments, Foreign Aid

This section is intended to show a country's exposure to other countries through trade and finance. This can give insight to foreign economic policy. Also related to monetary policy.

Project goals

Identify fundamental economic values which anyone must have to understand an economy - GDP, total debt, etc.
Identify the best sources which report these values. Collect archives of past data and write instructions for how anyone can get updated whenever it is reported
Put these datasets of economic values into Wikidata
Help develop the system whereby datasets in Wikidata are transcluded into articles for all languages; for example, if there is a dataset reporting GDP for every country in a certain year, then the Wikipedia article for any given country in every language ought to be able to report the latest economic data by default and call economic data for any other year in Wikidata's backend. This reporting could be done in infoboxes which are translated into every language but which report the same numbers no matter what language.
Even if Wikidata is not working correctly now to report such things, the datasets still need to be collected and formatted so that these things can be reported when Wikidata works as it should.
When anyone in any language can search for country names in any language and automatically find basic economic information on Wikipedia, the project will be improved
This does not have to stop at countries - when economic data is available for states, cities, regions, or any other mappable area with related Wikipedia articles, this same scheme can connect data hosted on Wikidata to all relevant articles in all languages.

Of existing proposals to propagate data to all languages of a Wikipedia page, starting with something fairly well agreed upon like numbers from the World Bank would not be unreasonable as a test case.

Wikidata integration

Wikidata task force: d:Wikidata:Global Economic Map task force

Proposed properties: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/Pending/2#Nominal_gross_domestic_product

Plan

Wikidata already has a page on each country, administrative division and larger companies and financial institutions.
The Global Economic Map project will work with Wikidata to define the additional items and properties needed to incorporate the Global Economic data into Wikidata in a form which is machine readable.
Once the Wikidata development team have completed the development of the datatypes required for this project (notably the URL datatype and the Number with Dimension datatype - both due to be completed by September 2013)mw:Roadmap#Wikidata deployment then the properties can be created and the Global Economic Map project will work with Wikidata to create bots to automatically import data from various databases into the various pages in Wikidata. Each datum will be a separate statement on wikidata with a source (where it came from, when it was downloaded) and appropriate qualifiers (industry sector, time period it refers to, location). Where automation is not practical the data will be imported by hand into Wikidata, including the source and date info.
Wikidata will make this data, like all the data on Wikidata, available, through their public API, in various standard formats, so it can be reused by others.
As part of Wikidata stage 3 (due autumn 2013) the Wikidata developers will work on creating queries and data visualisations using the data in Wikidata. The Economic World map team will create a mini standalone site where the economic data can be queried and displayed in various ways.
The Global Economic Map team will work with the Wikidata stage 3 developers and one of the wikipedias (probably not the English Wikipedia - their articles are pretty stable so they don't want too much experimentation) to create data visualisations using the data on Wikidata and add this to national and regional wikipedia pages. Once these are stable they can be adapted to other nations and regions on that wikipedia. These can then be be used as a model by other wikipedias.

Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) collaboration potential

The Global Economic Map potentially could use the global network of the Open Knowledge Foundation to retrieve and organize comparable economics statistics and translate in different languages. In this way the Global Economic map would utilize OKF tools to present and visualize data in information dashboards to give access to raw data in an open format for researchers, journalists and citizens.