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Free Open Data Sources

Consulting makes you love data. You will need as a consultant to gather data from different datasources and then try to make sense of them. Your client is often the main source of data, but it's possible that you will need to gather more information from other sources for benchmarking or other research activities. In fact, big consulting firms constantly invest large amounts of money gathering data, which is not always possible for smaller consultancies or independent consultants. This is why I am sharing with you in this article few of my favorite free data sources I often use for my projects.


    World Bank Open Data

     The world bank open data portal should be the the first stop for every consultant or researcher looking for financial and economical data about a country. Many of the projects I have been working on are in the government and public sector, and the economies I am usually studying or analyzing are developing countries without sufficient available data online. To collect the data, the World Bank supports a number of globally coordinated programs and now exposes 78 databases for 264 countries/region on its portal. Unfortunately, the data is not always available for all indicators, and more specifically for developing countries.

    World Bank Open Data portal allows you to quickly display a country economical and financial overview and make the comparing between two, or more countries. It's also possible to download the countries data in CSV, EXCEL or XML



    The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 189 countries working to foster global growth and economic stability. The IMF has an advanced research department monitoring the global economy and the economies and policies of member countries. 
    The IMF Economic Data is an incredible useful source of information related to global finance, economical reports, investments, trade, and more. Similarly to the World Bank Open Data, you will be able to view and download time series data. What I like the most about the IMF is the fact that most indicators not only include historical data but also have forecasts. I usually use the IMF forecast as a baseline for my analysis instead of building my own growth models to save time and energy.
    The CIA World Factbook

     The CIA World Factbook has been for me the starting place when gathering information about a country. My colleges usually don't take me seriously when I advise them to check the CIA website for quick and reliable country facts. Yet, it is the single point of access to facts on every country in the world from its history, government, demography, economy, energy, communications, geography, transportation, military and transnational issues. The online portal will save you time looking for these information from different data sources, especially information about developing countries which are already hard to find.


    UNICEF dataset

     UNICEF’s exposes valuable open datasets reflecting the situations of children and women everywhere. The datasets expose a wide range of data about disease outbreaks, gender and education, and more. The data is monthly updated in order to make it more reliable and accurate. It also has interactive data visualizations through data query tool and you can download this data in CSV format.
    Google Public Data Explorer

     The Google Public Data Explorer consolidates a list of data sources from a wide range of organizations such as World Bank, Eurostat, IMF and many others. The portal is a good starting point when you don't know from where you can find the information you are looking for. Once I locate the source of the data you are visualizing, I usually open the original data source and try to find it raw from the original website. The visualisations are quite dynamic as well.

    Google Dataset Search

    When you don't find datasets using The Google Public Data Explorer, you will notice there is a suggestion link to use Google Dataset search within the page. You might find what you are looking for, but it's not always as accessible or free.



     Finviz

     Finviz is my favorite free stock screener. The website gives traders an overview about the market and the stocks. I discovered Finviz before starting my career as a consultant while looking for information about the stock market. You can use the portal to quickly find information about a public company (summary, financial performance, latest news -etc.) which saves you from the hassle of reaching for them on your own.



    You can also find free data from the following open data online websites:

    Data.gov: the home of the U.S. Government’s open data including all sorts of information
    European Union Open Data Portal: rich of information about the European countries
    Eurostat: easy to navigate portal to find historical data about European countries 
    OECD Data: Data about 43 countries on multiple topics (economy, education, jobs -etc.)
    World Health Organization: similar to the UNICEF datasets; statistics about health, nutrition and disease
    UN Comtrade Database: datasets on global trade
    Opencorporates: information about more than 100 million companies in the world
    Kaggle: a "cocktail" of data from more than thousands of datasets
    Google Trends: gives you the latest search trends based on search queries in Google Search
    HubSpot: A large repository of marketing statistics and trends




    I hope you found this helpful. Please leave your comment below if you have any question or any recommendation to share.



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