May 2012: Mimas at the University of Manchester has been awarded £1.88 million in Department of Business, Innovation and Skills e-Infrastructure funding via the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to renew and enhance UK wide data redistribution agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United Nations (see the 17th April 2012 newsflash. The following datasets will be additions to the existing data portfolio. Work will start on processing these databanks in Oct 2012:

• OECD Agriculture Statistics
• OECD Banking Statistics (2012 update only)
• OECD Economic Outlook
• OECD Employment and Labour Market Statistics (Annual and Quarterly Labour Force Statistics and Labour Markets Database).
• OECD Health Statistics
• OECD Structural and Demographic Business Statistics
• OECD Insurance Statistics
• OECD Monthly Statistics of International Trade
• OECD Tax Statistics (Revenue Statistics and Taxing Wages)
• OECD Telecommunications and Internet Statistics Annual data on mobile and internet usage, access and investment for 30 OECD countries.
• OECD Patent Statistics
• OECD Environment Statistics
• OECD Product Market Regulation Statistics
• OECD Social and Welfare Statistics (replaces existing Social Expenditure Statistics)
• OECD Productivity Statistics
• OECD Regional Statistics
• OECD Pensions Statistics
• OECD Institutional Investors Statistics
• IMF COFER (Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves)
• IMF FSI (Financial Soundness Indicators)
• IMF Primary Commodities – 200 series, data starts 1980
• IMF CPIS (Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey)
• IMF CDIS (Coordinated Direct Investment Survey)
• IEA Energy Projections for IEA Countries

The agreement with the IMF includes access to the IMF eLibrary Text Collections: Books and Periodicals – 10,000 documents, 825,000 pages, history to 1951.

The National Statistics Time Series Data and UN Common Database will be removed from the data portfolio as of October 2012.

From 1st October 2012 to 30th September 2014, access to the UN Comtrade database will be as a 'Guest user' via the UN's own interface at http://comtrade.un.org/db/. The UN's interface allows free access to all of the Comtrade data, but there is a download limit of 50,000 per data query (without limitation on number of queries). From the 1st October 2014, the international data team will begin processing this data for delivery via the new integrated interface which does not have a 50,000 download limit.

For the latest status of data negotiations, data processing work and release dates for each of the datasets within the ESDS International data portfolio, please see the data availability section.

Information on when each dataset was last updated can be found under the Data updates section.

User requests for data can be made in the Data Wishes section.

Also see ESDS International new data releases to search the Data Catalogue for new releases of both micro (survey) data and the macro databanks.