2020.04.08 edition
Pandemic-era economic policies. A group of researchers have built a structured dataset quantifying 166 countries’ economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The dataset draws mainly from the International Monetary Fund’s COVID-19 Policy Tracker — which describes the policies in free-form text — and supplements it with additional research. The quantified policies include fiscal stimuli, monetary stimuli, interest-rate cuts, and interventions to control the countries’ balance of payments. [h/t u/smurfyjenkins]
Historical economic productivity. The Long-Term Productivity database was created at the Bank of France in 2013, and has been updated several times since then. For 23 OECD countries from 1890 to 2018, the database tracks total factor productivity, labor productivity, capital intensity, GDP per capita, and more. [h/t Mokhtar Tabari]
Forty-plus years of FOIA. Journalism professor A.Jay Wagner has compiled a dataset of 14 federal agencies’ Freedom of Information Act annual reports from 1975 through 2018. For each agency and year, the dataset contains the number of FOIA requests processed, granted, and denied; exemptions invoked; appeal outcomes; staffing figures; fees assessed; and more. [h/t George LeVines]
Police drones. Last month, the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College released the third edition of its Public Safety Drones report, in which researchers identified “1,578 state and local police, sheriff, fire, and emergency services agencies in the U.S. that are believed to have acquired drones.” You can explore and download the data through the report’s interactive map.
A lot of domain names. Software engineer Bohdan Turkynewych has compiled a dataset of more than 50 million domain names, discovered by crawling the web and processing 86 terabytes of internet traffic. Related: French registry Afnic publishes a full list of all registered .fr domains. [h/t Javier Sáenz]