The data provided by the Global Credit Project is the result of a multi-year effort to collect and harmonize the most detailed possible information credit markets around the globe. It draws on more than 600 individual sources, many of which were digitized for the first time. On this page, we provide these historical data series for free under the Terms of Use and License Terms outlined below. Integrating all or parts of these data for the purpose of selling them is strictly forbidden.
The current version of the database covers information on total credit for 188 advanced and emerging economies for the period 1910-2014. Sectoral data for 117 countries starts 1940. With these data, it is possible for the first time to measure how much credit flows to different sectors in the economy on a cross-country basis. The data cover all major financial markets and consistently above 90% of world GDP. If you are interested in how these data were constructed, please consult the research page.
The historical data covering the years 1940 - 2014 are made available free of charge under the terms of use and license terms below. All values are outstanding amounts of credit in millions of current national currency. Letter names stand for ISIC Rev. 4 sector names (e.g., "C" for manufacturing); see the United Nations guide on the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities for reference. We plan to continuously improve these statistics, so we advise users to reference the exact date they downloaded the database.
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When using these data, please cite the following paper:
Müller, Karsten and Verner, Emil, Credit Allocation and Macroeconomic Fluctuations (2023). Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3781981 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3781981
@article{MuellerVerner2023,
title={Credit Allocation and Macroeconomic Fluctuations},
author={Karsten Müller and Emil Verner},
journal={Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3781981},
year={2023}
}
For methodological details, the paper "Credit Allocation and Macroeconomic Fluctuations" by Karsten Müller and Emil Verner documents the sources and approach we used in constructing these data. The paper and accompanying data appendix also acknowledge the support we received from research assistants and colleagues. You can find these documents on the research page.
Interested in the precise underlying data series for a particular country? Please feel free to contact us.
This dataset was developed over many years with the financial support of the Governor Woods Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and an NUS PYP Start-Up Grant (A-0003319-01-00). We would also like to thank the institutions where we have conducted our research.
We grant every user at no cost a license to use and/or share the licensed material, in whole or in part, provided that it is for non-commercial (e.g., academic) purposes, provided that our dataset is properly attributed and cited to credit the authors, and provided that it may only be shared under identical license terms. Commercial data providers are thus strictly forbidden to integrate all or parts of the dataset into their services and/or resell the data.
All users of this work agree to the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
See here for the full license terms.
To comply with the attribution requirement in the license, whenever it is used the dataset must be cited as outlined above.