Statistics & economics

Statistics and economics data is the numbers that describe how countries and economies work: population, employment, trade, prices, health, and hundreds of other indicators, published by international bodies and national agencies. It tends to be consistently structured, carefully documented, and freely reusable, which makes it dependable material for a RAG system, the setup that answers questions by retrieving relevant records and then generating a reply from them. When someone asks “what was unemployment in a given year”, this is where a trustworthy answer comes from.

Choosing within this category is mostly about coverage and comparability. Global compilers like the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, and UN Data give you many countries on shared definitions, so figures line up across borders. Eurostat goes deeper on Europe. Our World in Data sits apart: it wraps the underlying statistics in written explanation, which retrieves much more naturally than a bare table when you want a system that answers in prose. SDMX is worth knowing as the common exchange standard several of these bodies share, so once you can read one, you can often read the others.

The main thing to watch is that raw statistics are tables, not sentences, so chunking them into passages rarely works well. You usually need to turn each figure into a readable statement, with its indicator, place, and year attached, before embedding it, the step of converting text into searchable numerical vectors. Mind vintages too, since agencies revise figures and definitions shift over time. The sources below range from broad multi-country compilers to explanation-led resources ready to retrieve as they are.