APIs

As demand for reproducible macroeconomic analysis grows, manually extracting data from international organizations becomes a bottleneck: processes are poorly documented, non-scalable, and difficult to automate. SDMX —the statistical standard adopted by the IMF, ECB, OECD, World Bank, and others— offers a structured solution that makes it possible to find, understand, and extract data consistently through APIs. This post provides a practical introduction to how the SDMX model works, how to identify dataflows, structures, and codelists, and how to build reproducible queries in both XML and JSON. Using examples from the IMF (WEO) and the ECB (€STR), it shows a generalizable workflow for automating macroeconomic series in R, culminating with the use of the imfapi package, which abstracts much of the technical complexity.

Dec 7, 2025