IMF
The International Monetary Fund publishes headline macroeconomic indicators through the IMF DataMapper, drawn from the World Economic Outlook, the Fiscal Monitor and other IMF datasets. Through ScholarMuse, an agent can search the DataMapper indicator list with find_series and fetch one indicator for one country with get_series, including the years the IMF marks as estimates or projections.
ScholarMuse tools: find_series, get_series. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from IMF.
find_series
Matches come from DataMapper indicator labels. A country named in the query is added to the seriesId as ?country=ISO3.
- seriesId
- e.g. imf:NGDP_RPCH?country=IND
- title
- Indicator label with its unit
- frequency
- Always Annual for this source
- units
- Unit given by the IMF
- geography
- Country named in the query, if any
- dataset
- IMF dataset the indicator comes from
- description
- IMF description, first 400 characters
get_series
- seriesId
- Indicator id with the resolved area code
- title
- Indicator label
- units
- Unit given by the IMF
- frequency
- Annual
- geography
- Country name, or World
- dataset
- IMF dataset the indicator comes from
- projectionsFrom
- First year treated as estimate or projection
- start
- First year returned
- end
- Last year returned
- count
- Number of observations returned
- observations
- List of year and value pairs
What it covers
- The indicators the IMF DataMapper lists, from the World Economic Outlook, the Fiscal Monitor and other IMF datasets.
- Geography is one country by ISO code, or the world total. Series are yearly.
- Series usually run past the current year, because the IMF publishes estimates and projections alongside history.
Limits
- Annual data only. Monthly and quarterly IMF databases are not reached through this connector.
- Values for the current year and later are returned as plain numbers. Use projectionsFrom, or set end, to separate them from history.
- One indicator and one area per call. If no country is given, the world total is returned. Regional groups other than World need the DataMapper's own area codes.
- Search matches English indicator labels only, with at most 8 IMF candidates per find_series call.
How ScholarMuse reaches IMF
The connector calls the IMF DataMapper API v1 directly and sends no key. It downloads the indicator list and matches your query against indicator labels, then requests /{indicator}/{area} for the values.
Values are cached for up to 1 day and the indicator list for 7 days, so a new IMF release can take that long to appear.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: IMF Data Terms and Conditions (free reuse with attribution)
Source: International Monetary Fund, IMF DataMapper (imf.org/external/datamapper).
Records that come from IMF carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow IMF's own citation guidance.
