[Gretl-devel] Fed Database

In http://lists.wfu.edu/pipermail/gretl-devel/2010-September/002930.html Henrique asked if it was possible to update gretl's Fed database independently. I have now added in CVS, under the "utils" subdirectory, two new C programs, one to build a gretl database from data from the St Louis Fed (FRED), and one to build a database from Federal Reserve Board (FRB) data. These correspond to the databases fedstl.bin and fedbog.bin respectively. In both cases we use data in XML format, and to compile and run these programs you'll need a full installation of libxml2 (library and header files). The current fedbog data file must be downloaded manually before running the processor (see FRB/README). The fedstl program, fred2db, downloads the current data non-interactively, and it requires libcurl. If you want to use this program you should get yourself an "API key" for FRED -- see http://api.stlouisfed.org/api_key.html . This should be placed in a file named "api.key" in the same directory as the program fred2db. Allin Cottrell