Intro

My name is Mathieu, I am trained in data, but have now been working as a practitioner in international development for several years. To keep up with some level of analytic skills, I use continuing education: at the moment MIT Horizon which provides clean non-technical summaries and course recommendation by hot tech topics.

As reading about data can only get one so far, I am resuming here a light R practice to keep in touch with the tool and apply data science in a low stake space.

(Now, this is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com.)

Say, what do we even do?

Today, I am wondering what we are doing globally right now. Motivation came from curiosity for international exchanges and for foreign exchange rates dynamics. Let us see where we can go one step at a time.

Checking global GDP data

Hearing of UN Data as a good source for open data, let’s check it out. I look first at GDP data.

data <- read.csv("http://data.un.org/_Docs/SYB/CSV/SYB66_230_202310_GDP%20and%20GDP%20Per%20Capita.csv", sep = ',', skip = 1, header = T)


data$Region.Country.Area <- as.factor(data$Region.Country.Area)
data$X <- as.factor(data$X)
data$Series <- as.factor(data$Series)
data$Year <- as.integer(data$Year)
data$Value <- as.double(gsub(",","",data$Value)) 
# yeah ok, we were on the moon 60 years ago, but can't get numbers recognized smoothly by R so..

summary(data)
##  Region.Country.Area    X                            Year     
##  1      :  28        T\xfcrkiye         :  28   Min.   :1995  
##  2      :  28        Afghanistan        :  28   1st Qu.:2005  
##  4      :  28        C\xf4te d\x92Ivoire:  28   Median :2015  
##  5      :  28        Africa             :  28   Mean   :2012  
##  8      :  28        Albania            :  28   3rd Qu.:2020  
##  9      :  28        Algeria            :  28   Max.   :2021  
##  (Other):6607        (Other)            :6607                 
##                                                   Series         Value         
##  GDP in constant 2015 prices (millions of US dollars):1694   Min.   :     -54  
##  GDP in current prices (millions of US dollars)      :1695   1st Qu.:      30  
##  GDP per capita (US dollars)                         :1694   Median :    5274  
##  GDP real rates of growth (percent)                  :1692   Mean   :  594126  
##                                                              3rd Qu.:   42990  
##                                                              Max.   :96698005  
##                                                                                
##   Footnotes            Source         
##  Length:6775        Length:6775       
##  Class :character   Class :character  
##  Mode  :character   Mode  :character  
##                                       
##                                       
##                                       
##

That’s it, looking at “GDP in current prices (millions of US dollars)”, in a first place, we do a lot maybe, about
97 M of M USD of GDP in 2021. This piece of information does not tell us anything about what we do, with historical observation we can start comparing…

Let’s see it tho

So no idea what we do, and that’s a pretty short history, but basically better than ever after a little Covid dip, kudos to all.