EconData V3.0.0

We are pleased to announce a new release of our EconData platform

While most of the changes in the latest release are not at the user level, we have made some improvements to the interface. Most notable is the categorisation of our various datasets into a browsable hierarchy. The user will first browse these categories when requesting data. We hope that this will allow a deeper understanding of the data at a glance and make the experience of querying data a little more intuitive. Furthermore, except for a few data sets, when querying the data, the user can now select individual time series to query rather than having to specify a list of filters (although the original interface is also maintained).

The Excel add-in will also reflect these changes in its interface and you will now be able to refresh your data from the header row alone (the metadata below the header may be omitted). The add-in requires no change to your existing spreadsheets. The R package, on the other hand, has significant changes to its interface.

This, in turn, reflects changes made to the EconData API v3.0.0 which introduces breaking changes discussed below (to inspect changes to the underlying EconData API, please see the documentation here).

Firstly, to install the latest version of the R package, please follow the instructions here. The most important changes to the package to take note of are (you can also read the package documentation for more detail)

  1. The data set ID’s may not be the same for any particular data set, but in general they will be
  2. Version numbers have three numbered parts instead of just two
  3. You no longer need to provide a provideragencyid and providerid
  4. releasedescription is now just release – which can be the description of the release or simply a date/time with format "2024-01-15T09:00:00" that will return the data as it was at that time (use format(Sys.time(), "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S") to return the latest release and "unreleased" to return data that is yet to be released).

So where we previously had

read_econdata(
  agencyid = "ECONDATA",
  id = "MINING",
  version = "1.1",
  provideragencyid = "ECONDATA",
  providerid = "STATSSA",
  releasedescription = "Oct 2023 (2023-12-12)")

We now simply have

read_econdata(
  id = "MINING",
  version = "1.1.0",
  release = "Oct 2023 (2023-12-12)")

The next few weeks will also see the rollout of some exciting new data sets for subscribers (and academics on request). Firstly, we will be expanding our coverage of the National Treasury’s budget data. This will include most of the main tables of the Budget Review as well as many of the annexures. We will also be adding comprehensive coverage of the collective investment schemes data made available by the Association for Savings and Investment South Africa (ASISA).

Kind regards

The Codera Analytics team

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