Economic and demographic data — Podcast

In this podcast we explore economic and demographic sources that are available to you in the library

Specialist Library Support

Published in

Specialist Library Support

4 min readJun 23, 2020

Podcast

Economic and demographic data podcast on SoundCloud.

Transcript

Hi my Name is Carlene and I’m an eLearning Technologist here at Manchester. In this podcast we are going to focus on the economic and demographic sources that are available to you in the library.

You can find statistics everywhere and we are often bombarded by them on a daily basis from the news, twitter, our friends, the internet…“did you know that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population?”

Anyone can publish statistics and this can range from the Government, International Agencies like the World Health Organisation and private companies like Coca Cola — this is not an exclusive list as stats can come from everywhere! Access to this information can be free as in the examples of the UK Government website, the Office of National Statistics but in general this information and the analysis that goes with it can be very expensive.

The important question is how do you as a student at Manchester find statistical sources which will answer your questions? And how do you find ‘quality’ information to back up your theory, your idea or your point of view?

The resources that the Library subscribes to contains both the data and the analysis of the data which you can then use for your coursework.

A quick way to start accessing the resources in this podcast are from the Business subject guide or the Data & statistics Libguide which you can find on the library website — these resources cover the UK, the EU and International sources of statistical information.

Let’s have a look at the different resource you can access and use.

The first one that I am going to talk about is Statista which describes itself as the “Global №1 Business Data Platform” including “Insights and facts across 600 industries and 50+ countries”. Its statistics coverage ranges from the number of active users of Facebook 2008–20020 to the global prices you’d pay to eat a Big Mac!

In addition to statistics the database also provides detailed quantitative analysis of worldwide markets such as digital, technology and advertising to name a few — but what do you get in this analysis? It might be easier if we look at one particular topic and see what we could find in Statista that you could use it in your coursework.

So let’s see what information we can find on the housing market in the UK using the Statista database.

Just searching for phrase “house market” brings up a wide range of resources straight away — we can see there are stats, market forecasts, infographics and topics — and dossiers which aggregate this information together.

If we check out the dossier for the Housing market in the UK we get both the detailed statistics and the analysis of the sector from house construction, prices, finance and the rental market. This will provide you with both the data and the analysis of that data that you need to answer a question on this topic. There is also a lot of related information in Statista about the house market that you can read.

Statista is also a useful database for sourcing demographic information — I searched for UK demographic analysis and located the “Demographics of the UK” dossier — this covered everything from population, births/deaths and regional data.

The second resource that we are going to look at is Passport which is owned by Euromonitor International, a London based market research and business intelligence firm — you can find focused reports on industries, economies, how consumers are behaving –what are they buying and what are they not buying, company Info and Analytics.

Where Passport is particularly strong is in its focus on international market intelligence and statistical data — it includes analysis from over 200 countries. (adapted this from something JH wrote)

The UML subscription provides you with access to information about industries (e.g. Luxury goods), economies (e.g. GDP), consumers (e.g. household income) and also profiles of leading international companies.

You might want to search for how Brexit is impacting the UK economy — how is it affecting the financial sectors, UK markets, our industry etc — when I searched in Passport I found a report focused on these exact areas — checking inside the report I could see that it touched on the uncertainty surrounding Brexit, a SWOT analysis of the UK, the current state of the economic landscape and much more — if you are looking for any kind of detailed financial analysis to use in your coursework then Passport should be one of your go to places.

Just remember Statista & Passport are only two examples of key databases that you can use for your research — through the library you can access a whole range of high quality information sources to support your studies here at Manchester.

I hope you found this podcast relevant and good look with your coursework.

Further posts and podcasts on this topic

Further support

Specialist Library Support — workshops and online tutorials
FAQs: The Library has produced a database of frequently asked questions (as part of our Ask an Expert service) which is well worth consulting. If you are finding something difficult, there is a good chance another student has too, and we add to this database regularly throughout the academic year.