The OECD Main Economics Indicators is a database of major macroeconomic series for roughly 50 countries. This operation (on the Data/Graphics menu) downloads the current release of all the data for all countries. It creates (in the chosen directory), separate RATS format files for the individual countries named for instance USAOECD.RAT, FINOECD.RAT, where the three letter prefix is usually the country's ISO code. There are also two files named AGGOECD.RAT for "aggregate" data, such as totals for G20 countries, and ALLCOUNTRIES.RAT which has all the data across countries.

The amount of data varies considerably from country to country. The larger economies may have up to 1000 series, some dating back to 1960 (which is the earliest data point in the database), while some smaller ones may have only exchange rate data.

 

Note that this is only available on RATS levels that can have the capacity to manage the processing of the data. (64-bit Pro).

 

This can (and generally will) take a while as noted in the dialog. All data files are created in the directory selected.

 

 

Country Abbreviations

These are used both for the names of the country-specific files (argoecd.rat is the file with Argentina data) and as the prefix for the series names.

 

 

Regional Abbreviations

These are including in the "aggregates" file (aggoecd.rat) and are the series prefixes.

 

 

Downloading Existing Data

For those who can't use the OECD download, we provide a copy of the data (updated every few months) on our web site at

 

https://estima.com/downloads/data/oecd

Copyright © 2026 Thomas A. Doan