(last updated: Feb 2024)
NOTE: if you have used this guide (including earlier versions) to write Stata packages, then please acknowledge it within the package documentation.
Eurostat is the official statistical database of the European Union (EU). It is a fairly extensive, one-stop shop on all possible indicators ranging from socio-economic variables, demography, environment, trade, mobility, regional development, etc.
Navigating the Eurostat website can be daunting. Same, or similar, variables exist across different datasets, larger data sets can also have several subsets as separate data files, and some datasets contain derived variables. In short, one can get lost quite easily. Additionally, for research or data-related projects, one usually has to collate information by combining different datasets into one large database. Doing this manually can be cumbersome. Since the datasets are also intermittently updated, a significant amount of time can be spent on checking for new versions and downloading and recompiling files.
In this extensive step-by-step guide, we will learn how to circumvent the above problems by automating the downloading, extracting, cleaning, and the labeling process.
