ECODATA

R package for downloading and visualizing data from FRED and World Bank

Copyright (C) 2024 James M. Murray

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Installation

The package is available from https://github.com/murraylax/ecodata. Use the devtools package to install directly in R:

devtools::install_github("murraylax/ecodata")

Set up

Load the library:

library(ecodata)

The package uses the FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) API, which requires an API key. If you have not already done so, you must create an account at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/, login, then go to https://fredaccount.stlouisfed.org/apikeys to create an API key. Click the button, + Request API Key and follow instructions. When complete, you will have an API key that will be a 32 character string with letters and numbers, similar to ‘abcd1234efgh5678ijkl9012mnop3456’ (this is a fictional key, it will not work to use exactly this string).

Set up the API key to use in the ecodata package (and/or the fredr package) by entering the following in the R console (replace the string with your own key):

ecodata_set_fredkey("abcd1234efgh5678ijkl9012mnop3456")

You should only need to do the above once per machine, then the FRED API should be available every time you load R.

Get started