The FT Data section of the Financial Times now has a neat interactive unemployment tracker (free but onerous registration required) that lets you explore employment rates and trends in EU member countries from 2004-2013:
The graphic was created by FT Data Journalist John-Burn Murdoch with R. To automate the process of collecting the underlying data, Murdoch used the R package SmarterPoland by Przemyslaw Biecek. Limited not just to data about Poland, the package includes a function getEurostatRaw which can be used to download any dataset from the Eurostat database, a rich resource for anyone looking for economic and demographic data about Europe.
Financial Times: EU unemployment tracker
Eurostat functions from the SmarterPoland are also further developed in the separate eurostat package: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/eurostat/ or https://github.com/ropengov/eurostat
Posted by: Janne Huovari | April 30, 2015 at 03:24