by Shantala Mukherjee, CFA, CAIA

<aside> 📎 Shared on LinkedIn in September 2020

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It has never been easier to practice visualisation and analysis of data!

The worldwide CoVID outbreak has spurred a lot of people to collect data on cases, deaths, age groups, economic activity, pollution, etc. in order to analyse the progress of the disease, the impact on the economy, and signs of economic recovery. In addition to the impressive dashboards built by organisations like Johns Hopkins University, there are also many regular people who have added to our knowledge by building their own visualisations.

If this inspires you to start on your own data analysis journey, you're in luck because there is an abundance of resources on the web to learn how to do so — either by using a programming language, or no-code tools. Video channels, free or cheap courses, blog posts, templates, etc. — there's probably some medium of instruction to suit everybody's learning preference!

But first, you need to have data to work with. A lot of instructional materials use sample datasets, but personally I am not interested in analysing flower petal lengths or the amount of annual rainfall. I find that it's always more fun when you're working with data that you are interested in — which in my case is primarily economic or financial data. Therefore I have collected a number of great free sources of global economic and financial data that you can use to practice your data visualisation and analytical skills on. This is a fairly short and incomplete list as there are so many other sources out there, but I've focused on sites where the data can be easily downloaded in CSV, TSV or Excel format.

Do I have permission to use this data?

If you are analysing data purely for your own satisfaction and don't intend to publish it anywhere, then there is probably no need to worry about permissions. But many of us would like to share our insightful analysis and beautiful charts with the world, so it is very important to know if you can do so without being served scary legal notices. I have listed below the permissions that each data source grants for using and sharing their data. Please don't rely solely on my synopses — be sure to read the linked 'legal' or 'terms of use' sites in full.

Data Sources List