1 Introduction

Data are everywhere and becoming more and more important. Here I am going to describe a solid way to access, analyze, visualize and use official data statistics coming from Eurostat’s database, the official data provider of the European Commission.

1.1 Eurostat database

Eurostat is here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat

Basically this website provides two things: - Access to database tables and datasets - Reports from Eurostat’s staff about the data

Data and data reports are two different things. Although reading the reports is important, the main topic of this book is to provide ways to “read the data” in “our way”. Nothing tricky or weird about this, just how to read the data and perform tasks like: - Search - Filter - Link and/or join - Visualize the data in a meangifull way towards an analytical target.

Why do we need to do this? Some reasons:

• Reports are limited in scope, for example Eurostat’s staff never comment about the data (newtrality principle)
• Research reasons, we need a specific dataset to work on a scientific question, program, or just for quriosity,
• Media communication and fake news fight, unfortunately we live in a world with huge misinformation and official data statistics might clarify a lot of misinformation if properly presented.

1.2 SMDX and other related databases

Eurostat data and dataset might look weird to a typical spreadsheet user, but Eurostat did not invent the wheel. Eurostat is part of big international consortum the SDMX consorctium https://sdmx.org/ the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange, an international initiative that aims at standardising and modernising (“industrialising”) the mechanisms and processes for the exchange of statistical data and metadata among international organisations and their member countries (from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDMX).

Members of SDMX iniative are:

• Bank for International Settlements
• European Central Bank
• Eurostat
• International Monetary Fund
• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
• United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD)
• World Bank

All these organisations and dissimiate datasets using the same way: the SDMX. Learning about SDMX and Eurostat is more or less identical about all other data providers.

1.3 R and tidyverse

R is statistical language and an enviroment for statistial computing. This is not a book about R per se, altougth it contains a lot of R related staff. Specifically makes heavily use of the tidyverse package a modern way to deal with data.

R can be downloaded from here R-project. For efficient writting of R programs and scripts the Rstudio IDE is highly reccomended.