The study file is in EBCDIC. I could never get the COBOL program to unpack
the datafile and neither could one of my Georgia Tech CS undergrads.  We
converted the file from EBCDIC to ASCII using a free/online converter.  My
student didn't know COBOL, so he wrote a program to unpack the data.  I
could never get the data to match up with the data from the IMF CD or the
printed yearbook data, even for country series that should have been clean.
We never figured out the source of the discrepancy.  I got distracted with
more promising projects.  Hopefully someone else on the list has had more
luck or been more persistent.

You can get most of the data, but not going all the way back to the 70s,
from the CD.  The hardbound Yearbooks go back to '73, I believe.

md

Michelle Dion, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Sam Nunn School of International Affairs
Georgia Institute of Technology
781 Marietta Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30332-0610
tel: (404) 385-4081
fax: (404) 894-1900
[log in to unmask]
www.michelledion.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Political Methodology Society [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Benjamin Freeman
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 9:50 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [POLMETH] Unpacking code for ICPSR Study 8624

I am having some difficulty working with the IMF Government Finance
Statistics Data from the ICPSR Study No. 8624.  Specifically, I do not know
exactly how to unpack the main data file.  Has anyone written code to unpack
this file?  Or, does anyone know of an alternative source for this data that
does not require unpacking?

Thanks,

Benjamin Freeman
PhD Student
Texas A&M University
[log in to unmask]

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