International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The IMF has responded to recent complaints about their operations
by becoming more transparent itself. At this site, you can read a
great deal about the IMF (including its annual report and extensive
material on its structure), their fact sheets on a number of
topics, press releases, news briefs, speeches from the managing
director, and details from their publications catalog. Among data,
they offer currency exchange rates. Among publications, they offer
the "IMF Survey" (which "provides topical coverage of the IMF's
activities, policies, and research in the context of global
economic and financial developments") and the full text of IMF
Working Papers, Staff Country Reports, and Papers on Policy
Analysis and Assessment. They also offer "Letters of Intent,
Economic Programs, Memoranda of Economic and Financial Policies and
Policy Framework Papers" for the various countries that they deal
with.
Their "Dissemination Standards Bulletin Board" contains the "Special
Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS)" which provides information to
international capital markets about a country's economic and
financial data. Of course, this information is quite useful to
economists as well. For many countries, it lists where most
macro data can be obtained (including on the Internet) from
countries that participate in this program. For just the U.S., this
is a very useful resource as it says who generates various series and
how they are collected.
http://www.imf.org
