Historical data

In the course of my research and PhD dissertation, I compiled a database of historical Irish macroeconomic variables. Some of these series have now been incorporated into the Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database. However, the full database available here includes:

1. Real and nominal GDP
2. Personal consumption and income
3. Industrial production
4. Unemployment rate
5. Industrial wages
6. Short- and long-term interest rates
7. Private and personal sector credit
8. Money supply

Most series are available from the 1920s or 1930s to present. All series are annual and are compiled from a number of sources. Data on consumer prices, import and export prices are available for this sample period from the Central Statistics Office. Therefore, they are not included here.

A description of the data compilation can be found here.

An excel sheet of the data is available here. The ‘Read Me’ page gives information on the coding of variables and referencing.

Other sources of Irish data include duanaire.ie (trade, public finances) and individual data series that have been compiled in various papers, some recent examples of which (for stock prices, house prices, money supply and GDP) are listed in the compilation note in the link above.

For a paper, ‘Monetary Regimes, the Term Structure and Business Cycles in Ireland, 1972-2018‘, I compiled monthly Irish Government bond yield data for 8 maturities from Central Bank of Ireland Quarterly Bulletins, over the period 1970-1999. The maturities, which are 1-, 2-, 3-, 5-, 8-, 10-, 15-, 20- years, are available for subsamples of this period. The data are available here.

A benchmark monthly yield from 1970 to present is available on the Fred database (via the CSO). A comparison of the Fred data and the Quarterly Bulletin data presented here suggests that prior to January 1985, the Fred data are the 15-year yield, and that for the period January 1985 to June 1993 the Fred data may be an interpolation of the 8- and 15-year yields. A discussion is included in the paper.

In a paper, ‘A quarterly Phillips Curve for Switzerland using interpolated data, 1963-2016’, which is published in Economic Modelling, I interpolated annual real GDP growth for Switzerland into quarter-on-quarter growth rates. The final, interpolated series can be accessed here.

Annual real GDP growth and CPI inflation for the period 1855-2015 which I used in the paper ‘160 Years of Aggregate Supply and Demand in Switzerland‘ (published in the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics) are available here. The data are originally from Gerlach (2016) who spliced series from Historical Statistics of Switzerland.