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Welcome to the qogdata wiki!

Purpose

The xtdata package aims at providing some helper functions to users working with Quality of Government (QOG) datasets, especially with regards to merging different country-year cross-sectional time series. The package allows the user to download data from the QOG data server and from several sources, as well as to merge, plot or subset it according to the specifications of the xtdata data frame attribute.

Readings

• Jerven, Morten (2013), Poor Numbers. Cornell University Press.
• Rothstein, Bo (2011) The Quality of Government. University of Chicago Press.
• QOG Reading Recommendations (time series methodological articles)

Technical

• Here is a complete description of the xtdata specification attribute for data frames, with planned improvements.
• Here are the Stata do-file and R scripts to generate the QOG variable indexes and demo dataset bundled in the package.

TODO

• let xt discover multiple panel data types
• let xtcountry discover additional identifiers
• let xtmap accept other formats than iso3n
• let xtmap plot maps of the US based on state and state.fips
• let xtmap plot maps of france (subset NUTS-2 region to French ones)
• code xtregion to handle NUTS regional codes
• code xtdes, xtsum, xttab Stata equivalents
• code xtsubset to subset panel data while preserving full time series
• code get_eurostat to get Eurostat national and regional data
• code qoglabel for getting QOG value labels
• code xtlag and xtlead as in DataCombine
• code xttse and xtdecay as in time-since-event and decay functions
• code find in utils:
  • minimally look for regex in variable names
  • look for foreign and memisc attributes and look for regex in variable labels
  • build a table of results that includes n, and for xtdata datasets, t, ts.min, ts.max
  • accept t and labels (overrides xtdata and defaults to NULL)
• idea: code something like dataRep in Hmisc
• idea: support simcf (Zelig simulations for TSCS models)
• idea: recode better indexes
  • get Stata variable labels from R after importing with foreign
  • add value label column and label and label table
  • make qogfind search the first and qoglabel search the second

Further inspiration

The get functions and xtdata specification for panel data were inspired by Anthony J. Damico's usgd repository of scripts for survey analysis, Zack M. Alquist's R packages for the U.S. Census, and by other R packages to work with survey data. The qogdata package is an effort to bring similar tools to country-level panel data users.