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