An Internet Primer for Economists
ARCHIVED: Last updated January 1996
1. Introduction
In universities and other research institutions more and more computers have been attached to some kind of network in recent years. This local network is often part of the world-wide Internet. Whilst in the 1980's only old-style mainframes and high-end UNIX workstations were connected, by now many personal computers (PCs) have been linked up. Since most offices are equipped with PCs, many users are now able to access a tremendous amount of resources distributed all over the world right from their desk. Starting from literature searches in the local library, the list of possibilities ranges over discussion lists, data archives, to the retrieval of text or graphic files.This paper gives a short description of the most important tools used on the Internet and surveys the most important resources for economists. It should be regarded as an introduction rather than a complete survey. The rate of technical progress on the Internet is very high, therefore any survey can only be a moment's shot.
Krichel and Wichmann (1994) provide an update to this review
Within the next years we will see many more tools and services appear as well
as lots of new resources. We avoid going into too many technical details about
the Internet tools or reviewing Internet resources that might be outdated
tomorrow. More detailed and up-to-date information on tools and services can
always be found in documents named FAQs, an abreviation for "Frequently Asked
Questions" on the Internet.
The remainder of this survey consists of four sections. In the next
section we give a short introduction into structure and development of
the Internet. Section 3 describes frequently used network tools, while
Section 4 contains a list of Internet resources. Section 5 concludes.
The Internet began about twenty years ago as a computer network initiated by
the US Department of Defense. The ARPAnet, as it was called, was an
experimental network. The goal was to find out how to build a computer network
such that it would be operational even if a part of it had been destroyed. This
task lead to a decentralised network that operates with a packet-switching
technique. Every computer (host) on this network communicates with another by
sending packets of data to the receiving host, which are unpacked by the
recipient. These packets may represent parts of files, electronic mail, or
commands; the principle of transmission remains the same. The sending computer
divides the data into small pieces, packs them according to a special protocol,
called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)and sends them
off to the recipient. As with normal postal mail, the sender does not know
which way the packet will take, it only knows where the next router is located.
This is a machine capable of forwarding Internet traffic to the next router.
This router knows to which further router packets, say, to Canada, may be sent.
The Canadian router then knows the university, and so on, until some router
knows the destination host.
This setup is made possible by assigning a unique address to each computer
connected to the Internet, the so-called Internet address or IP-address. It is
made up of four numbers between 0 and 255 which are connected by dots, e.g.
130.149.200.199. Since they are often hard to remember, there are also names
corresponding to the numbers. The IP-address above could be for a computer
called xyz.ww.tu-berlin.de. Each component of the name (or the number) is
ordered hierarchically according to so-called domains. Thus de (130) is (a part
of) Germany, tu-berlin (149) is the Technical University Berlin, ww (200) its
department of economics and, finally, xyz (199) the name of a computer in this
department. The last part of the name usually denotes the country of the
organisation. In the United States the ending shows the kind of institution,
so for example edu indicates an educational unit and gov a government agency.
The Internet is growing rapidly. From 1985 to January 1994, it has grown from
about 200 to more than 21,000 networks. The number of computers connected to it
has in the same period increased from 1000 to now over 2 million. The traffic
on the network is currently rising at a speed of about 6% per month.
Most readers in the United Kingdom will have come accross the term "JANet"
which stands for Joint Academic Network. JANet was first introduced in the mid
80s as a closed network for the UK only. It operated via X.25 lines on a
sequence of protocols called the "coloured book" protocols. One of the most
noticable differences was that the host names where uk.ac.host instead to
host.ac.uk, as you would expect within a TCP/IP framework. As the importance
of TCP/IP in the rest of the world continued to grow, so did the
inconvenience caused by the use of a different protocol. In 1991, the
JANet/Internet protocol system (JIPS) was introduced. This software allowed
the use of the TCP/IP protocol on the X.25 lines. Three years later, a second
phase of JANet called SuperJANet was introduced. This second phase is entirely
TCP/IP based. JIPS and SuperJANet users are de facto on the Internet.
Because of the decentralised nature of the Internet, it is rather easy to
connect an individual machine to it, if the institution is already connected to
the Internet. All that is needed is an Ethernet-card (a piece of hardware to
handle the network communication), a connection to the local area network, and
an IP-address, which can usually be obtained from the local computing centre.
Do not pick your own without advice. As the last step some software has to be
installed that allows to access the Internet resources. We will review this
software in the next section.
Almost all Unix computers have a mail programme already installed which is
usually called "mail". For PC-users things are slightly more complicated
because the PC operating system is generally unable to receive mail whilst
running another application. Apart from installing the mail software on the
PC, the mail user must obtain a user account on a dedicated mail server,
usually a Unix machine or a Novell server. Mail for the PC user is received by
this mail server and forwarded to the PC upon request. Most departments or
computing centres have already set up dedicated machines for this task so that
the PC user only needs to install a suitable mail client software. The two most
used mail programmes for the PC are Pegasus Mail in conjunction with a Novell
network and Popmail if the mail server is a Unix machine. Using the mail
software is fairly straightforward. We therefore focus on the e-mail message
itself and its components.
An e-mail message consists basically of two parts: the "body", which is the
actual text, and some technical information in the "header" of the message. The
header contains a series of fields, some them are shown in the mailing software
and at least one, the recipient's address, has to be filled in when sending
mail. The address always goes into a field labelled " To:". Similarly, there
exists a " From:" field which is filled in automatically and identifies the
mail sender. The subject can be put in a field called " Subject:". Finally a "
Cc:" often appears. This stands for carbon copy and filling it in will send a
copy of the mail to the stated e-mail address.
There are a number of optional lines that can be included in the header. The
Reply-To: line, for example, can be used to direct replies towards a specific
address. For example, when mailing out the communist manifesto, you might enter
the line
Reply-To: Karl Marx <k.marx@highgate.london.uk>
in the header to redirect responses towards the author. On arrival, the header
will also contain a list that records all systems through which the message has
passed.
The most important part of the header is the recipient's e-mail address. If a
message does not reach the recipient, this is usually due to a mistake in the
address field. This can easily happen because e-mail addresses are often
somewhat cryptic, which leads to frequent typing mistakes.
Generally an Internet e-mail address consists of two parts: a user name (the
login name on the mail server) and the mail server's IP address. Both are
separated by the (@) sign, e.g. president@whitehouse.gov
When an e-mail is returned to the sender, the returned mail contains a line
that indicates the problem. Examples are: ... 550 User unknown, ... SMTP
Service unavailable on destination host, or ... 550 Host unknown (Authoritative
answer from name server). In a majority of cases, the problem is caused by a
typing mistake. Otherwise, the address may be wrong or the owner may have
changed her address. A real network problem is rare.
There are many features built into the mail software to facilitate e-mail,
especially if you send and receive a lot. To name but a few, aliases
(abbreviations) can be defined for e-mail addresses, mailing lists can be set
up or signature files including personal information can be defined. Some
e-mail programs can even filter incoming mail or blow a whistle upon receipt of
mail.
Here is a list of public domain software for e-mail:
While Unix machines are usually shipped with a telnet software, this is not the
case for PCs. However, telnet is part of most commercial TCP/IP (the
Internet network protocol) based network software like Sun's PC-NFS or FTP's
PC/TCP. There is also a wide range of public domain software for DOS, Windows
or Macintosh available (see below).
The use of these programmes is very similar as far as the telnet session itself
is concerned. Telnet is usually started with the remote host's IP address,
which might be given in name as well as in number form. A connection is
established as soon as the remote host asks for a login name. If the connection
is not established the program often changes into command mode which can be
left by typing quit. A simple session may look as follows (user commands are
underlined).
Usually, a user account with password on the remote host is necessary
to use the remote computer. An exception are most library OPACs
(Online Public Access Catalogues) and other publicly accessible
databases or special programmes. The major list of OPACs is compiled
by Barron and Mahe (1993). It contains a short description of how to
access the mentioned libraries and some information about the
different types of OPAC.
A special case, which occurs frequently when connecting to US
libraries, are IBM mainframes that require emulation of an IBM3270
terminal, while telnet usually behaves like an ancient VT100 terminal.
(Most hosts know how to handle this type of terminal and so does the
telnet software.) While this is seldom a problem on Unix machines,
some types of terminal software for PCs can not emulate an IBM3270
terminal. Those that can often have a separate programme called
tn3270 which is started like telnet. Whether an OPAC requires a
3270 terminal can be checked on OPAC lists or found out by trial and
error. If the connection is closed silently, this might be the reason.
Sometimes an Internet resource indication not only contains the remote host's
IP address but also a number. In this case the number is a non-standard port
number. These numbers allow a machine to distinguish between different
communication streams. With a non-standard port number some special application
is often launched directly without the need to give a login name. You would use
telnet with the portnumber like telnet host.with.strange.port 999.
Public Domain Software for telnet can be obtained from:
Software ____________ anonymous ftp-server _______ Directory
NCSA Telnet ............ ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu .......... /pub/Telnet
To connect to a remote host for ftp, a user account with password on the remote
computer is usually necessary. A notable exception are the so-called
"anonymous" ftp-servers. These are machines that offer all kinds of data for
retrieval by anybody.
For the usage of ftp it is useful to be aware of the following commands:
Large files on ftp archives are often compressed (packed) to save disk space
and transfer time. Packing can be detected from the filename ending. A file
named large.whale.zip is compressed with the DOS programme PKZIP, while
large.whale.Z is packed with the Unix command "compress". Other common endings
for compressed data are gz, z, zoo, sit, or lzh. Public domain software to
decompress files is usually available from the local computing centre. Some
newer ftp servers also offer the option to send compressed files in
uncompressed form. You simply have to enter the file name without the
compression ending, e.g.to get the file large.whale.Z decompressed, simply
enter get large.whale.
Public domain software for ftp is usually shipped together with the
telnet software. If you do not have ftp access, you may want to
check into these FTP-by-Email services
Hostname_____________________ Body ____________________Area
ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com help (return) quit US
For the user, gopher is organised like a menu or a directory tree. When making
your way through a series of directories to search for a piece of information,
you might have connected to several gopher servers all over the world without
even noticing it, because the gopher client will connect from one server to the
next. A server is in most cases set up by university departments or research
institutions who install the server software and update the information it
contains. They also set up a directory structure suitable for the gopher's main
topic. The information is stored within these directories. It can be text or
binary files, graphics or sounds. Links to other gopher servers are included,
as well as telnet or ftp sessions and index searches.
While the gopher server administrator has to spend some time on structuring the
information in a reasonable way, all the user needs to to is to install a
gopher client on her machine. Clients are by now available for most operating
systems.
Suppose you are interested in the Summers/Heston (1991) dataset also called the
"Penn World Table", which contains macroeconomic data for a large variety of
countries on a purchasing power basis. A link to this dataset is included in
the directory structure of a gopher server in Berlin. To call this server type
gopher otto.ww.TU-Berlin.DE. [UPDATE: This server is no longer active. This article is kept for historical purposes only.]
Upon connection, you will get the following screen:
A complete collection of gopher clients and server software can be found at
Internet users who do not have a gopher client at their disposal may use public telnet accounts
with gopher clients. Telnet to one of the following sites and you will
find yourself in a gopher menu.
Hostname __________________ Subject ____ Body
gopher@calvin.edu help
To access "the web", you need a browser programme similar to the gopher client.
Such programmes are now available for most computer systems. The browser reads
hypertext documents by following the links in the document. They can run telnet
session or use ftp and gopher servers. World Wide Web can therefore be
considered to be the most inclusive Internet tool. For graphical interface
systems like MS-Windows or X-Windows, NeXTStep and Macintosh, there are
graphical browers that can not only access character based information, but
also links to graphics and sound. These browers have become very popular.
In the field of economics there are still very few hypertext servers, and
certainly far less than gopher servers. One of these is located at the CTI
Centre Centre for Economics (see section 4.2.3.). Using the NCSA Mosaic browser
the root page of this server looks as in Figure 1. Clicking on the underlined
"CTI subject centres" would get to similiar servers related to other discplines.
For those who want to try out the World Wide Web without installing a browser,
some telnet accounts with plain text browsers have been set up. To start,
simply telnet to one of these machines.
Public domain WWW browsers may be obtained from:
For mail, the URL takes the form mailto::user@hostname For ftp, the URL is
written as ftp://host/path, where host is the Internet host, and path is the
path of the resource. Telnet sessions are represented as telnet://login where
login stands for the combination accountname:password@host, when we omit the
password none is required. Gopher sessions are represented as
gopher://host:port/type/path where type is an indication of the type of gopher
object. Finally when refering to WWW's own hypertext transfer protocol, we
represent the location as http://path.
Most news readers run on Unix machines (e.g., rn, nn, trn, tin), but there are
also some available for Macintosh or Windows. Once the software is set up, you
can read news articles, reply to the original poster via e-mail, post a
follow-up article, post your own questions or comments to ongoing discussions,
or---and this a very important feature---filter out postings that contain
certain keywords or belong to certain ongoing discussions. Generally, most of
the news articles have a low information value, but there are some notable
exceptions. These are newsgroups that are concerned with technical information,
moderated news groups and some scientific news groups that have a technical or
a rather narrow subject.
cti-econ@mailbase.ac.uk, the "CTI Centre for Computing in
Economics List" for
academic economists. This list is the largest UK based list, opened by the CTI
Centre for Economics. Discussions are rare on this list, but it carries job
advertisements and other sometimes useful announcements. All UK based academics
should subscribe to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk.
Pol-Econ@shsu.edu "Political Economy" This list is no longer a
pure list since
it now carries the messages sent to the newsgroup sci.econ.research, a
moderated newsgroup. Often the list carries genuine discussions in any field
of economics.
cope@shsu.edu is the distribution list for the "Cyberchronicle
of Political
Economy" the world's first refereed electronic journal in Economics. The
journal will be based on the LaTeX document formatting system and the sole
issue of the journal to date contained an review of LaTeX. Future editions
should feature brief articles, book reviews and comments. For subscription to
the journal mail to listserv@shsu.edu, for submissions of articles mail
cope-sub@shsu.edu. General inquiries about the journal should be
sent to
cope-mgr@shsu.edu.
IE-list@cs.ucl.ac.uk "Intelligent Systems for Business and
Economics Digest".
This is a list that is similar in purpose to csemlist, but it is carried as a
digest, i.e. large messages are sent out that bring together a number of
contributions. In the past many messages where concerned with applications of
neural networks. Subscribe to IE-list-request@cs.ucl.ac.uk.
nonlin-l@list.nih.gov "Economic Nonlinear Dynamics List". Low
traffic list
with good quality contributions. Subscribe to
listserv@list.nih.gov.
economics-experimental@mailbase.ac.uk on experimental economics.
The list
carries new entries in the library of the Centre for Experimental Economics at
the University of York, England. Subscribe to
mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk.
econhist@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu "Teaching and Research in Economic
History".
This list is sponsored by the Cliometric society, which has also opened a
gopher server, see below. It was founded in late 1993 and is moderated.
tch-econ@vax1.elon.edu on "Teaching of Economics". This list is
more
practically oriented towards the teaching of the subject. This list has become
fairly active and carries genuine discussions.
educ-econ@mailbase.ac.uk, a discussion on the "Economics and
Management of
Education". The list is based at mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk. It has
essentially a
UK based membership and has had few contributions.
forensiceconomics-l@acc.wuacc.edu the "Forensic Economics List".
Subscribe to listserv@acc.wuacc.edu.
law-economics@mailbase.ac.uk "Law and Economics", subscription is
handled by mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk.
econlaw@gmu.edu "An Economic Analysis of Law". For a subscription
write to listserv@gmu.edu.
e-europe@pucc.princeton.edu called the "Eastern Europe Business
Network".
This a moderated but still heavy traffic list that is essentially concerned
with the needs of business in Eastern Europe. It carries only business
information and has no input from researchers interested in the broader issues
confronting the Eastern European economies. However, it might be useful to
obtain general information about those countries. Subscribe to
listserv@pucc.princeton.edu.
east-west-research@mailbase.ac.uk on the "Transition in Eastern
Europe & the
former Soviet Union". This is the forum for economists interested in Eastern
Europe, but contributions to the list have been scarce. Subscription requests
should be mailed to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk.
ekonomika@pub.vse.cz "Discussion of the Czech Republic's
Economy". The list,
which opened in April 1994, operates in the Czech language. Despite its recent
age and linguistic entry barrier it is fairly active. It is related to all
aspects of the Czech economy and should be a valuable tool for those who seek
information on this economy.
econom-l@brufsc.bitnet intended to "Discussao Sobre Economia
Brasileira" where
you can subscribe to listserv@brufsc.bitnet.
china+econ@uclink.berkeley.edu for "Academic Discussion of
Research in the Chinese Economy".
china+econ-request@uclink.berkeley.edu is the address at which
the list owner may be reached.
carecon@yorkvm1.bitnet is a fairly active list on all aspects of
the "Caribbean Economy", subscribe to listserv@yorkvm1.bitnet.
ibads@tome.worldbank.org stands for "Information Bank on African
Development
Studies". This mailing list is run by the African Technical Department at the
World Bank to spread information about development issues in Sub-Saharan
Africa. Subscribe to listserv@tome.worldbank.org.
economy@acadvm1.uottawa.ca is a more general list on the problems
of
developing countries. This used to be a very active list. Until mid 1993, it
used to carry many messages that discussed the politics of development. Now
only a few announcements are sent from time to time. Various attempts to
stimulate discussions have failed. Subscribe to
listserv@acadvm1.uottawa.ca.
trade@csf.colorado.edu "International Trade", another list
maintained by
listserv@csf.colorado.edu, but with much smaller traffic.
ruraldev@ksuvm.ksu.edu "Community and Rural Economic Development
Interests", a
low-traffic list that suffers from not having a closely defined aim.
res-econ@Unixg.ubc.ca "Land & Resources Economics Electronic
Conference", is a
more recent then ruraldev, and with less traffic. Subscribe to
res-econ-request@unixg.ubc.ca.
econ-dev@csn.org "Local Economic Development", a topic that is
sufficiently
vague to attract many comments; subscribe to econ-dev@csn.org.
memsnet@uabdpo.dpo.uab.edu "Mineral Economics and Management
Society" is a
very small list, which essentially is as a communication channel for the
association's president. Subscribe to
listserv@uabdpo.dpo.uab.edu.
finance@vm.temple.edu "The Electronic Journal of Finance" This
list
has a large volume of subscribers, but the number and quality of
contributions has remarkably declined since early 1994. Subscribe to
listserv@vm.temple.edu.
e_invest@vm.temple.edu The "Electronic Journal of Investing" was
created by
the owner of the previous list to accomodate for the demands of people
interested in financial investment. It now carries postings of stockmarket
news. Subscribe to listserv@vm.temple.edu.
econ-stat@pitzer.edu "Reports of Macroeconomics Statistics and
Related
Discussion". This list appears in this catqegory because it carries the "Daily
Summary" by the Small Investor Company, which contains a summary of political
development together with an extensive set of daily data on the American
markets. To join the list, subscribe to mailserv@pitzer.edu.
buslib-l@idbsu.idbsu.edu "Business Libraries Discussion List"
This is the list
for business librarians, and because there is no economics librarian list, it
serves this group as well. All the large libraries in the world have somebody
on the list. For any economist who is looking for data or some difficult
reference problem, this is the list to contact. One might consider subscribing,
ask the question and unsubscribe later, to avoid the heavy traffic. Subscribe
to listserv@idbsu.idbsu.edu.
ecol-econ@csf.colorado.edu "Ecological Economics", This list is
concerned with
all economic aspects of the environment and of environmental activism.
Subscribe to listserv@csf.colorado.edu.
pen-l@bobby.ecst.csuchico.edu, is the "Progressive Economists
Network" that
unites all shades of left-wing economists in a fairly active list.
Subscriptions are handled by listproc@bobby.ecst.csuchico.edu.
femecon-l@bucknell.edu "Feminist Economics Discussion List" This
fairly active
list is concerned with a general discussion on feminist economics and it has a
working paper archive that operates via e-mail.
labor@shsu.edu "Labor Economics" was initially opened as a
student list. It
now is an open list for all questions of labour economics, but it is a quiet
list. Subscribe to listserv@shsu.edu.
edgar-interest-request@town.hall.org about the SEC Edgar database
(see section
4.3.1). This list is restricted to announcement of news regarding this
service.
econ-wp-l@town.hall.org about the WUSTL archive for Economics
working papers
(see section 4.3.2.). Subscribe to listserv@econwpa.wustl.edu.
A more recent development are services collecting either references of new
working papers or even the actual working papers in electronic form. Mostly
these are available as TeX or PostScript files. PostScript files are
particularly easy to create since almost every major word processing program is
able to generate them, and they can be printed on any PostScript printer
without further processing. Therefore some universities have started in the
last years to make their working papers also available in electronic form.
CERRO is a common project of the University of Economics in Vienn a, the
Slovak Academy of Sciences, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. The project focuses on economic and political aspects of the central
European region. The CERRO archive contains discussion papers, papers given at
an email conference on East-West integration, archives of the e-europe mailing
list, and some data from the region, for example on the hungarian stock market.
The archive is at gopher://olymp.wu-wien.ac.at/11/.cerro.ind.
The Cliometric Society
has a gopher server at gopher://cs.muohio.edu that contain information about
members, events, abtracts, course syllabi, and some historical datasets. The
server can also be accessed as telnet://gopher@cs.muohio.edu. Mail
administrator@cs.muohio.edu for further information.
Iowa Electronic markets
allow people to trade contracts over the Internet. Each person can invest
between $5 and $500. Trading is continous and takes place via telnet to
telnet://iem.biz.uiowa.edu. There are political markets where the value of the
fundamental depends on electoral results, and there are financial markets where
the contract value at liquidation depends on the value of a financial asset.
For further information mail iem@scout-po.biz.uiowa.edu.
Financial Economics Network
This organisation was founded in autumn 1993 and now concentates on the
publication of a series of e-mail messages called the "Journal of Financial
Abstracts" that list abstracts of new publications in finance. It intends to
become a fee based service. Mail marr@clemson.clemson.edu for further information.
The advantages of the Internet are mainly its decentralised nature, the speed of
data transmission and the possibility to access any resource in the world from
any place. This makes it very easy for each institution to set up services for
the distribution of its research results, be it ftp archives for working papers
or data sets, mailing lists for their research programmes or gopher and WWW
servers for structured information. We would therefore expect that the number
of these decentralised services continues to increase.
With a rather long publication lag for many journals working papers have become very important for
the research process in economics in recent years. Handling paper requests,
copying and shiping the papers already requires a considerable amount of time
and funds in many departments. Here local working paper archives are probably a
cost-decreasing alternative and we would therefore expect their number to
increase in the near future. The same applies to data sets---at least those
that do not have copyright restrictions imposed upon them---which can be made
available in this way for further research.
The availability of journal articles over the Internet or the foundation of
new, purely electronic journals, might be something for the more distant
future. Since published journals are sold, payment schemes for electronic
documents would have to be imposed for the electronic retrieval of articles.
Not many institutions have so far experimented with charging Internet users for
resource utilisation. If journal publishers would charge for electronic
publications, authors---who receive no payment under the traditional
system---will have incentives to switch publications to free sites. Therefore
another, totally different publication procedure might be possible. One could,
for example, establish refereed electronic journals, where the submittants are
required to pay a fee for the referee process. The paper, if accepted, might then be available for
free over the Internet.
However, a lot depends on the technical and economic development of the
Internet. In the current situation, Internet users use it at zero marginal
cost. If this pricing structure changes, the face of the Internet will
undoubtably change but it is difficult to predict what the effect on volunteer
services will be.
The decentral organisation of the Internet will in our view also inhibit some
developments. Every central service that relies upon many local services, as
for example special topic gopher and WWW servers or hypertext documents, is
very vulnerable to changes in the local services. It requires a tremendous
amount of work to update links, search for new information and follow databases
over several hosts. The size of special topic services will remain restricted
by the resources an institution can devote to their updating. If the available
bandwidth increases through projects like the US' information highway or the
UK's SuperJanet, we would expect that only those link collecting services
to survive, that are able to devote sufficient resources to updating. All
users would connect to these services to access information.
Thomas Krichel University of Surrey
Barro, Robert J. (1989): Economic Growth in a Cross Section of Countries,
working paper, University of Rochester.
Barron, Billy and Marie-Christine Mahe (1993): Accessing On-Line
Bibliographic Databases, [URL: file://ftp.unt.edu/pub/library].
Berners-Lee, Tim (1994): Uniform Resource Locators, Internet draft, [URL:
ftp://nic.nordu.net/pub/Internet-drafts/draft-ietf-uri-url-03.ps].
Kehoe Brendan P. (1992): Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's
Guide to the Internet, 2nd. Edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Gaffin, Adam & Jorg Heitkotter (1993): Big Dummy's Guide to theInternet---A Round Trip Through
Global Networks, Life in Cyberspace,
and Everything\dots, [URL:file://ftp.eff.org/pub/Net_info/EFF_Net_Guide].
Goffe, William L., (1994): Resources for Economists on the Internet,
[URL: gopher://econwpa.wustl.edu:70/00/econ.faq].
Kehoe, Brendan P. (1992) Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide to the Internet.
"nd edn Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Krichel, Thomas and Thorsten Wichmann (1994): Internet Primer for Econo-mists:
An Update, Computers in Higher Education Economics Review, no.23, November.
Kroll, Ed (1994): The Whole Internet---User's Guide and Catalog, 2nd
ed., Sebastopol, CA:O'Reilly & Associates.
LaQuey, Tracy and Jeanne C. Ryer (1993): The Internet Companion - A
Beginner's Guide to Global Networking, Addison-Wesley.
Lindner Paul (Ed.) (1993): The Internet Gopher User's Guide, University of
Minnesota, [URL:gopher://boombox.micro.umn.edu:70/00/gopher/docs/
GopherGuide_Jun15b.ps]
MacKie-Mason, Jeffrey and Hal Varian (1994): Economic FAQs About the
Internet, [URL:gopher://gopher.econ.lsa.umich.edu/pub/Papers/FAQs.ps.Z]
Summers, Robert and Alan Heston (1991): The Penn World Table (Mark 5): An
Expanded Set of International Comparisons, in: The Quarterly Journal of
Economics 106, p. 327--368.
2. The Internet
There is no physical device called "the Internet". The "net" is made up of
numerous small network islands in universities, commercial firms and government
institutions that are connected by leased high quality telephone lines. While
the local area networks (LANs) are owned and operated by the respective
universities or other institutions, the connecting networks and services are
provided by special institutions, e.g. the NASA or NSFNET in the United States,
EUnet in Europe or JANet in the UK. This decentralised nature of the Internet
has always been its major feature and is probably one reason for its success.3. Internet Tools
In this section we survey the most important applications and tools for
Internet communication. From the large variety of Internet tools we have
selected those that matter most for the academic practitioner. More tools are
described by Kehoe (1992), Kroll (1994), LaQuey and Ryer (1993) as well as
Gaffin and Heidkoetter (1993). We focus on, respectively, electronic mail
(e-mail), terminal emulation on remote computers (telnet), file transfer over
the Internet (ftp), tools to access distributed information (gopher, WWW), and
network news. At the end of each section we give a short list of public domain
software that implements the tool. This software is free and can be obtained
by anonymous ftp (see 3.3) from the indicated source. Note that these lists of
software packages are not exhaustive.3.1. Electronic Mail
Electronic mail (e-mail) is probably the best known form of Internet
communication. Nowadays, not only plain texts can be transported via e-mail but
almost anything: files, graphics, and even sound. However, there is so far no
universally accepted standard for encoding non-text e-mail. Therefore mailing
non-text items requires agreement between sender and recipient about the
encoding tool. Since almost every mailing software uses its own encoding
method, this kind of communication remains restricted to users of the same
software. There exists a proposed standard for mailing non-text items, which
seems to be gaining larger acceptance. This protocol is called MIME
(Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). But the main use of e-mail is still
for plain text.
Software...... anonymous ftp-server... Directory
POP server.... ftp.cc.Berkeley.edu.... /pub/pop/popper
POPmail....... boombox.micro.umn.edu.. /pub/POPmail
NUPop......... ftp.acns.nwu.edu....... /pub/nupop
Pegasus Mail.. otago.ac.nz............ /pub/pegasus
3.2. Telnet
Telnet is an Internet communication protocol that regulates the interactive use
of remote computers. Usually the Unix or PC software have the same name for
this purpose. By using this software the PC behaves like a terminal of the
remote host. The only difference with a "real" terminal is that both are not
hard-wired but rather use the Internet to communicate. Therefore it basically
makes no difference if the remote host is in the same room or on the opposite
side of the planet.
----------------------------------------------------------
C:> telnet rollmops.ww.tu-berlin.de
Trying 130.149.200.199...
Connected to rollmops.ww.TU-Berlin.DE.
Escape character is ^]
NeXT Mach (rollmops) (ttyp0)
login:kuddel
Password:
Last login: Mon Sep 6 03:40:31 from somewhere.edu
rollmops> exit
logout
Connection closed by foreign host.
C:>
----------------------------------------------------------
For security reasons the password is not echoed on the local screen.
NCSA Telnet for Windows............ ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu .......... /pub/Telnet
WS_FTP ............ ftp.usma.edu .......... /pub/msdos3.3. Ftp
Ftp stands for "file transfer protocol" and as for telnet is also the name of
the software. Using ftp, files may be copied from remote to local computers or
the other way round. It might seem confusing at first that telnet may not be
used for this purpose, and that an extra software is needed for file transfer.
This goes back to the old days of computing when files were stored in the
mainframe and the terminal's only task was to tell the computer what to do.
Only in modern PCs, terminal and file storage are combined in one machine.
ascii ......... ascii mode to transfer plain text (default)
binary ........ binary mode to transfer programs or compressed data
cd ............ change directory on remote host
lcd ........... change directory on local host
dir ........... show directory contents on remote host
get ........... copy one file from remote to local computer
mget .......... copy several files from remote to local computer
put ........... copy one file from local to remote computer
mput .......... copy several files from local to remote computer
pwd ........... print working directory on remote host
help .......... help
quit .......... quit
The program is started on the command line with
ftp the.ip.address. To connect to an anonymous ftp-server you should
give the login ftp or anonymous. The convention is to
enter your e-mail address as password. Like in telnet it is not
echoed on the screen. A short session might look as follows:
----------------------------------------------------------
C:> ftp nber.harvard.edu
Connected to nber.harvard.edu.
220 nber FTP Server (SunOS 4.1) ready.
Name (nber.harvard.edu:kuddel): ftp
331 Guest login ok, send ident as Password.
password:
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp> cd pub/nber
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> dir
200 PORT command successful.
150 ASCII data connection for /bin/ls (0 bytes).
total 1332
-rw-r--r-x 1 2158 wheel 1189424 Jan 7 1992 pwt5.asc
-rw-r--r-x 1 2158 wheel 9066 Sep 28 1992 pwt5.doc
-rw-r--r-x 1 2158 wheel 3005 Jan 7 1992 pwt5a1.doc
-rw-r--r-x 1 2158 wheel 11834 Jan 7 1992 pwt5a2.doc
-rw-r--r-x 1 2158 wheel 67455 Jan 7 1992 pwt5b2.doc
-rw-r--r-x 1 2158 wheel 67455 Jan 7 1992 pwtb2.doc
226 ASCII Transfer complete.
403 bytes received in 0.79 seconds (0.5 Kbytes/s)
ftp> ascii
200 Type set to A.
ftp> get pwt5.doc
200 PORT command successful.
150 ASCII data connection for pwt5.doc (9066 bytes).
226 ASCII Transfer complete.
local: pwt5.doc remote: pwt5.doc
The first string (here: -rw-r--r-x) in a row denotes the access rights as well
as the type of each item. If the first letter is a d the file is a directory
while a - denotes a plain file. The last three letters denote the rights of the
anonymous ftp-user; r stands for readable, w for writeable and x for
executable. To access directories, they must be executable. Files available
for the public are usually stored in a directory called pub and in its
subdirectories. Note that in Unix directory names are sepatated by " /" and not
by "\backslash" as in DOS.
9350 bytes received in 68.37 seconds (0.13 Kbytes/s)
ftp> quit
221 Goodbye.
C:>
----------------------------------------------------------
ftpmail@grasp.insa-lyon.fr help Europe
ftpmail@doc.ic.ak.uk help or ftplist BITFTP@DEARN
BITFTP@vm.gmd.de help or ftplist Europe
3.4. Gopher
Gopher is a more recent development in Internet communication. Gopher was
designed at the University of Minnesota as a campus wide information system
with the aim that each department should be able to collect and organise their
own information on their own computers without the need for a central
coordinator. In addition any user should be able to access this information,
e.g.electronic phone books, library catalogues or announcements of cheese \&
wine parties, from any computer without specialist technical knowledge and no
knowledge of where the information is physically stored. The developers
achieved this goal by using the Internet protocols and by including tools like
telnet or ftp in gopher. The central idea is the so-called client-server
architecture, using server software that runs on the computer storing the data
and a client software on the user's machine. The client software allows the
user to communicate with gopher servers.
----------------------------------------------------------
Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl5
Root gopher Server: otto.ww.TU-Berlin.DE
1. ---------------------------------------.
2. Gopher Server Economics.
3. Technical University Berlin.
4. ---------------------------------------.
5. About this gopher.
6. New! Improved! Life! Gopherchanges.
7. Dept. of Economics - TU Berlin/
--> 8. Economics/
9. Mathematics/
10. Politics/
11. Services/
12. More Gophers, Gateways and other nifty stuff/
Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 1/1
----------------------------------------------------------
This is the gopher server's root directory. A dot at the end of a line
denotes a text file while a slash indicates a directory. Using the
arrow keys you move the cursor to the line which is likely to contain
the required information. Hit "return" to enter the Economics
directory. By changing directories a few times you will finally get
to the wanted data. Further use of the "return" key would bring the
contents of the ReadMe file on the screen.
----------------------------------------------------------
Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl5
Penn-World Table 5.5 (USA)
--> 1. Penn World Tables: ReadMe.
2. Penn World Tables: Description.
3. Penn World Tables: Data.
4. Penn World Tables: Compressed Data.
Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 1/1
----------------------------------------------------------
Its ease of use and its ability to combine both local and remote
information explain the popularity of gopher. It has spread beyond the
university sector to organisations such as the NBER, the United Nations and the World Bank.
ftp://boombox.micro.umn.edu/pub/gopher.
Hostname ________ IP Address ______ Login _____ Area
ux1.cso.uiuc.edu 128.174.5.59 gopher North America
panda.uiowa.edu 128.255.40.201 panda North America
gopher.msu.edu 35.8.2.61 gopher North America
gopher.ebone.net 192.36.125.2 gopher Europe
gopher.sunet.se 192.36.125.10 gopher Sweden
info.anu.edu.au 150.203.84.20 info Australia
tolten.puc.cl 146.155.1.16 gopher South America
ecnet.ec 157.100.45.2 gopher Ecuador
gan.ncc.go.jp 160.190.10.1 gopher Japan
If you do not even have a telnet facility you might wish to use gopher
by mail. Use the sites in the following table:
gophermail@ncc.go.jp help
mailgopher@biomed.nus.sg ..................... help3.5 World Wide Web
Similarly to gopher, World Wide Web (WWW) is a tool to access distributed
information in the Internet. The WWW project has been started by CERN (the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics) and is based on hypertext and
hypermedia. Hypertext is text with links to other texts---like footnotes in
scientific papers---that are called up by a simple mouse-click. If the new
document is hypertext again, it also has references in it that can be followed.
Hypertext is a subset of hypermedia, which can also contain other kinds of
media, e.g.sound, graphics or even animations.
Hostname Login Country
info.cern.ch - Switzerland
ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu www USA
www.njit.edu www USA
vms.huji.ac.il www Israel
info.funet.fi www Finland
Compared to WWW, gopher is still in wider use. One reason is that hypermedia
documents with lots of text and graphics included are relatively large and need
a longer time for transmission if the Internet is relatively crowded. Within
the United States with relatively good Internet connections and the Information
Highway about to come, hypertext documents are becoming more and more
fashionable. In Europe and other parts of the world where the Internet is made
up of dusty land roads rather than super highways, gopher will probably remain
more popular for a while.
Software anonymous ftp-server Directory
DosLynx ftp2.cc.ukans.edu /pub/WWW/DosLynx
Mosaic for Mac ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu /Mac/Mosaic
OmniWeb for NeXTStep ftp.omnigroup.com /pub/software
Mosaic for Windows ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu /PC/Mosaic
One of the most important effects of the spread of WWW has been the increased
use of the URL. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is a convention
initially adopted by the web to name the place where a resource can be found.
The URL tells the client software where to find a resource and how to access
it. A URL consists essentially of two `parts, the name of an access protocol
and a string that this protocol can resolve to obtain the exact location of the
resource. In section 4, we will list URL information for the resources. Here we
will give a simplified account of the URL syntax; see Berners-Lee (1994) for
further details.3.6.Network News
Network news is the Internet bulletin board. It is organised in so-called
newsgroups, each dealing with a special topic. When a user posts news to a
group it is mailed to all sites that receive this group. A typical news server
carries between 2000 and 4000 newsgroups and can receive as much as 50
Megabytes of news per day. Like many other Internet applications it is based on
a client-server model. The client software---called news reader---connects to a
news server to retrieve certain articles on that bulletin board. Most
institutions have their own news server to minimise off-site Internet traffic.
This server is fed by different sources: Usenet, a set of newsgroups generally
considered to be of interest globally, local newsgroups that contain
information only for interest to a country, city, network or institution, and
finally commercial newsgroups. These newsgroups are organised much like IP
adresses in groups, subgroups, etc. For example the Usenet news group sci.econ
is a subgroup of the group sci. Unlike some other applications reviewed here,
network news is not confined to the Internet.4.Internet services
There is no good classification of Internet resources. Our approach is partly
based on the protocol, (mail, news, gopher\dots), and partly based on the type
of information that is offered. We review mailing lists, newsgroups, data
archive, literature services, and academic projects. We did not include all
resources mentioned in Goffe (1994).4.1. Mailing lists
The oldest type of service on electronic networks is the maintenance of
electronic mailing lists. The general principle of these lists is very simple.
When one sends a message to a list, the message is forwarded to everybody on
that list. In detail, arrangements may vary. Some lists are "closed", i.e.you
may only subscribe when admitted by the "listowner", but most lists are open.
Some lists distribute any message sent to the subscribers immediately, on
others messages are first reviewed by a moderator. On some lists, the reply
address points to the list, while on a minority of lists replies default to the
original poster, and if you wish to send your reply to the list you need to
mail a copy. Some list are maintained by humans, and therefore need a human
intervention to subscribe or unsubscribe, but most lists have a programme which
deals with this type of administration. To obtain more information about a
list's subscription procedure mail the single word help---not in the subject
header, but in the body of the message---to the subscription address. If the
list is managed by a programme, this will return a list of instructions that
are valid for the particular software that manages the list. Usually there are
many commands that allow you not only to subscribe and unsubscribe, but also to
change mailing options, to see a list of subscribers, to obtain back issues of
messages, or to query the archives of the list for posts that contain certain
keywords. In the following, we have tried to group different lists on similar subjects together.4.1.1.General Economics lists
corryfee@vm1.sara.nl "List of the Faculty of Economics,
University of
Amsterdam". This is the largest general purpose economics list in the world,
with over 600 subscribers. It is unmoderated, but replies are directed towards
the individual poster rather than the list. It carries new entries for NetEc
(see section 4.3.2), as well as some general inquiries, often on
computing-related problems. Subscribe to listserv@vm1.sara.nl.4.1.2 Empirical and Computational Economics
csemlist@vm1.sara.nl "List of the Society of Computational
Economics", in the
sense that it often mirrors messages on corryfee. Subscribe to
listserv@vm1.sara.nl.4.1.3.Economic History
history-econ@mailbase.ac.uk "Economic History E-mail Conference"
was the first
list for economic history, and it has mainly European, especially British
subscribers. This list publishes an Economic History Newsletter that covers a
variety of topics. Subscribe to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk.4.1.4. Teaching Economics and Economics Education
econed-l@vm.utdallas.edu on "Research in Economic Education".
This is a list
that used to be quite active, but has seen fewer messages recently. Your
subscription should go to listserv@vm.utdallas.edu.4.1.5.Law and Economics
There are three lists, the first one of which is the most active:4.1.6.Regional Lists
FedTax-L@shsu.edu concerns "Discussions on the Federal Tax
System" of the
United States. This list has a fairly high amount of traffic. However
subscribers seem to be more interested in exchanging advice on their personal
tax situation rather than discussing the properties of the system. Subscribe to
listserv@shsu.edu.4.1.7.Agriculture, Development and International Issues
ipe@csf.colorado.edu "International Political Economy" This list
is more
geared towards political scientists working at the interface with economics.
Subscriptions requests should be mailed to
listserv@csf.colorado.edu.4.1.8.Business and Finance
risknet@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu "Risknet" discussions on risk and
insurance.
The list is closely related to the gopher and WWW servers on these issues (see
section 4.3.2). Subscribe to listproc@mcfeeley.utexas.edu.4.1.9.Lists with a Progressive Orientation
pkt@csf.colorado.edu stands for "Post-Keynesian Thought", a list
with fairly
heavy traffic for discussion among the followers of the Post-Keynesian
paradigm. The list is also associated with a discussions paper archive that
can be accessed via gopher and ftp (see section 4.3.2.). Anybody who is
interested in Keynesian economics should subscribe to
listserv@csf.colorado.edu.4.1.10. Human Resources
health-econometrics@mailbase.ac.uk was opened to discuss
"Quantitative
Techniques in Health Economics", but it has been silent. Subscribe to
mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk.4.1.11. Internet for Economists Lists
egopher@shsu.edu "Gophers in Economics" A low traffic list, but
indispensable
for anybody who is administering a gopher system for Economics. Subscribe to
listserv@shsu.edu.4.2. Usenet Newsgroups
There are not many newsgroups dedicated solely to economics. The first
newsgroup concerned with economic questions was sci.econ. This group is not
moderated and traditionally carries a lot of political arguments. Therefore the
interest of academic economists in the group has always been limited. In 1993 a
moderated newsgroup sci.econ.research was established that is restricted to
academic economics. The group often carries discussions about course books and
data sets as well as conference announcements. It is archived on
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/economics/sci.econ.research.
Many economists find it rewarding to look into the mathematics and statistics
newsgroups. These are generally a good place for technical questions. The
newsgroups sci.math.num-analysis, sci.math.research, sci.math.stat, and
sci.math.symbolic are not only of interest to mathematicians. Mathematical
software programmes (e.g., Mathematica, Maple, Matlab) and their problems are
discussed regularly. This is a good occasion to seek for assistance, because
questions are often answered by the software manufacturers themselves. The same
applies to the statistical newsgroups sci.stat.consult, sci.stat.edu, and
sci.stat.math. Some econometric and mathematical software packages have their
own newsgroups. These are comp.soft-sys.sas, comp.soft-sys.shazam,
comp.soft-sys.spss, and comp.soft-sys.matlab.4.3. Archives
Here we bring together projects that use a variety of software bases. Most of
them are centred around a gopher server, but allow for other access modes. We
expect that in the near future many projects will be primarily WWW based.4.3.1. Data Archives
Most of the data archives that are listed here, are based in the United States
and therefore have a bias towards providing US statistics. The United Kingdom
however is closing the gap in the access to economic datasets through services
provided by the Manchester Computing Centre. Here we list some important data
sites that should be of interest to a number of economists. We are leaving out
some smaller and more specialised datasets to conserve space. Another criterion
for selection was that the site had to offer the actual data rather then
information about the data.The Economic Bulletin Board
The full Economic Bulletin Board of the United States can be accessed on the
Internet as telnet://ebb.stat-usa.gov. It contains about 2000 files from the
Commerce, the Treasury and Labor Departments, the Federal Reserve Boards and
other institutions. The areas covered are: Current Business Statistics,
Economic Indicators, Employment Statistics, Energy Statistics, Foreign Trade,
Eastern Europe Trade Leads, Industry Statistics, International Market Insight
Reports, Monetary Statistics, National Income and Product Accounts, Press
Communiquees of the US Trade Representatives, Price and Productivity
Statistics, Regional Economic Statistics.
This is a very rich resource, but
unfortunately it lacks structure. A further complication arises because the
format of the data is changing. Some are plain ASCII files, others are
self-extracting DOS files, and others are prepared for spreadsheet use. Full
access to the system is charged for; mail awilliams@esa.doc.gov to obtain
current rates. There is a guest facility whereby you can use the system free of
charge for 20 minutes, but not all files are available. However, under U.S.
law the information that is contained on the EBB is not copyrightable.
Therefore once extracted, copies can be made. That allowed the University of
Michigan to open a gopher server where the most important part of the EBB's
contents is regularly copied to.
Although they download most of the files put
up by the Commerce Deptartment, the Michigan version is not a comprehensive
archive of the government's EBB files. They do keep some of the historical
series (as in the Current Business Statistics area, for instance), but usually
they purge or replace files on a monthly, daily, quarterly, or annual basis,
depending on how often the Commerce Dept posts new versions. To access the
Michigan server, use the URL gopher://una.hh.lib.umich.edu:70/11/ebb. Access
via ftp is also possible ftp://una.hh.lib.umich.edu/ebb.EconData
This archive is the result of a project to construct an Input/Output model for
the United States at the University of Maryland. The data comprises the
National Income and Product Accounts, the balance of payments including foreign
direct investment, the flow of funds accounts, employment and earnings data,
consumer and producer price indexes, as well as business conditions statistics.
There is less data than on the Economic Bulletin Board but the organisation of
the data is much better. The URL is
gopher://info.umd.edu:901/11/inforM/Educational_Resources/Economic_DataLABSTAT
This is a series of public databases released by the United States Bureau
of Labor Statistics. It provides current and historical data for 26
surveys, more being added. At the time of writing, there are 7 surveys on
prices, 4 on productivity, 2 on bargaining, 11 on various aspects of
employment, and there is a copy of the international labour statistics.
The organisation of the data is very rigorous. The site also contain a
large number of press releases. The extensive documentation of the system
can be found in pub/doc. The URL for the system is
ftp://stats.bls.gov. For help and comment mail
labstat.helpdesk@bls.gov.The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)
is a database of social and economic data from household surveys for over 20
countries covering the period 1968 to 1989. During 1994 and 1995, additional
surveys will be added for the early 1990's. It contains more than 240
variables, concerning household and individual income, demographic variables,
employment and education. Because some member countries have imposed
restrictions its usage, the data can not leave the Luxemburg central site, nor
can it be accessed directly. Jobs are submitted via e-mail and outputs are
returned automatically. Currently SPSSX is the only analysis package supported.
Mail eplisjr@luxcep11.bitnet for initial contact.Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) National Datasets Service
MCC currently receives funding from HM government to provide a range of
datasets services to the UK academic community. These are based on the machine
midas.mcc.ac.uk. The data include the 1991 UK Census of Population (Local Base
and Small Area Statistics, Samples of Anonymised Records, Postcode to ED
Directory), the 1981 UK Census of Population (Small Area Statistics), as well
as the large national surveys like General Household Survey, the Family
Expenditure Survey, the Labour Force Survey, the Farm Business Survey issues
and the first wave of the British Household Panel Survey.
More data will be made available later, including the National Child Development Study, the
Quarterly Labour Force Survey and more waves of the British Household Panel
Survey. The economic timeseries of the UK's Central Statistical Office are also
available. Holding of international data is more sketchy. There is data from
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) available but unlikely to be updated
since the IMF discontinued the distribution of the data tapes via the ISPCR.
MIDAS holds the following sets: International Financial Statistics, Direction
of Trade Statistics, Balance of Payment Statistics Government Financial
Statistics. The OECD Main Economic Indicators are also available but no update
has been made since the 1989 issue. For information on access mail
info@mcc.ac.uk.Data General Archive for Financial Data
This archive collects any financial and investment data that is in the public
domain. Currently, close-of-day quotes are available for approximately 310
stocks. It is hoped that a larger base of contributions will be made from
people on the Internet and other organisations. The archive also contains some
programmes that are used to treat the data. The URL is
ftp://dg-rtp.dg.com/pub/misc.invest. Mail savage@dg-rtp.dg.com. for further
information.BTX-BOERSEN-INFO
This service offers daily data on prices shares and options traded on the
Vienna stock exchange since February 1993. The service is updated daily. It
also contains the trading volume for the previous day. It can be reached as
telnet://BOERSE@fbtx.tu-graz.ac.at. The system operates in German.Journal Archives
There are now two archives maintained by academic journals for the
storage of datasets. The Journal of Economics and Business Statistics
(JBES) pioneered with the opening of a site in
ftp://raphael.acpub.duke.edu/jbes. There is a separate directory for
each issue of the journal, and within each issue there are
subdirectories that have the names of the author(s) of the paper the
datasets stored are used to. Mail
jbeshelp@raphael.acpub.duke.edu for further infomation on this site.
In January 1994 the Journal of Applied Econometrics introduced a similar
requirement that authors of empirical papers submit their data to the
ftp archive ftp://qed.econ.queensu.ca/jae. The structure of
this archive mimics the JBES site. It is intended to hold copies of
the data sets used in all articles published in the journal, unless it
is impractical to do so. For example, data sets that are confidential
or extremely large would not be uploaded.European Commission Host Organisation (ECHO)
ECHO is a gateway to about 30 databases of European Community databases in
Luxemburg. Most of them deal with research and development. They can all be
queried by the same interogation language called CCL, for which extensive
online help is provided. The datasets which are of most interest to economists
include EMIRE on employment and employment law, TED on tender information and
CORDIS on the commission's R\&D activity. The system is accessible via telnet;
the URL is telnet://echo@echo.lu. 4.3.2.Literature Services
This is the part of Internet services where we will expect to see the most
important growth in traffic and the area where the effect of the Internet on
the profession will probably be the most important. The first bibliographical
services on the Internet were Library catalogues. Today most large academic
libraries have their catalogue on the Internet. A good collection of these can
be accessed via gopher://gopher.utdallas.edu (See also Barron and Mahe (1993)).
British users should note that the British Library of Political and Economic
Science can be reached as telnet://library@blpes.lse.ac.uk.NetEc
This is a group of projects that try to make the network more useful to the
academic community in Economics. The first project is BibEc, a collection of
references to printed publications in Economics, mainly working papers. Most
of the information on new papers received is mailed to the corryfee mailing
list, and loaded on a gopher server where it can be searched. The bulk of the
bilbliographical information is provided by a large collection of working
papers held at Universite de Montreal.
The National Bureau of Economic
Research, the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a number of other,
smaller institutions directly submit data on new working papers to BibEc. In
December 1993, the United States Federal Reserve Boards added the contents of
their "Fed in Print" database into BibEc. There are now about 30,000 papers and
articles catalogued in BibEc. A second project that was opened in April 1993
is called WoPEc. This stands for working papers in Economics, but it could
accomodate for any type of electronic publication. WoPEc defines an electronic
publication as a PostScript file that is accessible via anonymous ftp.
WoPEc has two complementary aims. The first is to provide a home for electronic
papers, i.e.a site to which people can upload their papers. These papers can
be found on ftp://netec.mcc.ac.uk/pub/NetEc/WoPEc and its subdirectories. The
second is to bring together bibliographic information about publications
available at other servers so that they can be searched together. For example
the papers from the 1994 Bank Structure conference that where made availbable
via ftp at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago are accessible via WoPEc.
The most recent NetEc project is CodEc, founded in April 1994. It aims to publish
computer code that is useful for Economists. The code can be be binary or
source, or it can be a set of scripts/macros for other packages. Right now
there are only a few programmes available. NetEc can be reached as
gopher://netec.mcc.ac.uk:70/11/NetEc. You can also use
telnet://netec@netec.mcc.ac.uk, but under this access not all facilities are
available.
WUSTL Economics Working Paper Archive
This archive was opened in August 1993. On this server papers are classified
according to the Journal of Economic Literature's classification scheme. There
are two special subject areas "test" (for test postings) and "meet" for
conference papers. The original software was written for TeX and LaTeX and that
remains the primary submission form on this archive. PostScript papers are
also accepted, as are binary files and wordprocessor files. The archive is best
accessed as gopher://econwpa.wustl.edu, and the gopher can be called via telnet
as telnet://gopher@econwpa.wustl.edu, or via WWW as
http://econwpa.wustl.edu/welcome.html. For further information mail the word
help in the subject header to econ-wp@econwpa.wustl.edu.The Post-Keynesian archive
This archive is linked to the pkt mailing list we reviewed in section 4.1.7.
In gopher://csf.colorado.edu:70/11/econ/authors working papers written by list
members are collected. Each author obtains a directory in which she can store
her papers. There is some bibliographic information attached to most papers but
the format and contents varies between individual authors. WoPEc is making
{missing text - see journal........}
include Projects under Development, Evaluation Reports, Staff Appraisal
Reports, Country Economic and Sector Work reports, Sectoral Policy Papers,
Environmental Data Sheets and National Environmental Action Plans. There is
also some bibliographic information on the world banks official publications.
The service can be reached as gopher://gopher.worldbank.org or on WWW as
http://www.worldbank.orgFederal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
This gopher site has been opened to distribute information about the
publication of this bank. Working papers of its staff were not yet available at
the time of writing. The URL is gopher://simon.wharton.upenn.edu4.2.3.General gopher and WWW servers
Technische Universitaet Berlin
The Economics Gopher Server at gopher://otto.ww.TU-Berlin.DE [Update: no longer active - Web editor] houses the most
comprehensive link collection for Economics in Europe. The examples in the
earlier section were taken from this gopher and all gopher resources mentioned
in this survey can be reached via Berlin. It mirrors parts of the NetEc system
and several data archives from the US. In Spring 1994 a job section was started
that contains current job openings for economists. For information about
submission to this section mail gopher@otto.ww.TU-Berlin.DE. There are also
collections relating to politics and mathematics. In the mathematics directory
archives of the "Mathgroup" mailing list are kept. This list is concerned with
any aspect of the computational software Mathematica.Sam Houston State University Gopher
This is the mother of all economics gophers servers. It has become a key site
for Economics because it has the largest collection of links to services in the
world. All the gopher-based services mentioned in this survey can be reached
via this gopher. In addition there are a number services maintained at the
site. One is a directory of e-mail addresses of economists, others are archives
for the Cybercronicle of Political Economy and the mailing lists that are kept
by Sam Houston State University, as well as copies of material from other
gophers and ftp sites. There is also an extensive collection of TeX related
material. The URL is gopher://niord.shsu.edu.The National Bureau of Economic Research
Their gopher was opened in 1993 to complement the ftp site that had already
existed earlier for the Penn World Tables. The Penn World Tables (see Summers
and Heston (1991)) provide comparative macroeconomic data on a purchasing power
parity base for about 150 countries. Other datasets available include the
Survey of Consumer Finance, a dataset on trade and immigration by Abowd and
Freeman (1990), as well as data from Barro (1989) and Wolf on economic growth.
Use the URL gopher://nber.harvard.edu or
ftp://nber.harvard.edu.University of Missouri at Saint Louis
This is a comprehensive gopher server for US government information. It
contains the Economic Report to the President, the North American Free Trade
Agreement, the country reports on economic policy and trade practices by the
State Department, the US industrial outlook, the US Census and numerous other
documents and datasets. The server should be accessed as
gopher://umslvma.umsl.edu:70/11/LIBRARY/GODDOCS.The United Nations
This gopher contains press releases and data on publications by or about the
United Nations and in particular about the United Nations Confernce on
Environment and Development and the United Nations Development Programme. The
server can be reached using gopher://nywork1.undp.org.The University of Michigan
has two servers that have material related to Economics. The main server,
gopher://una.hh.lib.umich.edu:70 contains the copy of the Ecomomic Bulletin
Board that we mentioned earlier, the US budget, and documents related to the
North American Free Trade agreement. A second gopher is kept on
gopher://gopher.econ.lsa.umich.edu. Here we find University of Michigan
discussion papers, some bibliographies and a set of BibTeX macros for economics
journals. There is also a collection on the Economics of the Internet.The CTI Centre for Economics
CTI stands for Computers in Teaching Initiative, and there are a number of
subject-based centres funded by HM government. This server is the first
dedicated WWW server for Economics in the world, it opened in May 1994. It
holds information about the Centre's activities. Electronic copies of CHEER
(Computers in Higher Education Economics Review) are being made available. The
URL is http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/CTICE/home.html.4.4. Academic projects on the Internet
Central European Regional Research Organistion (CERRO)5. The Impact of the Internet on Academic Research
This survey has only been able to show some of the Internet resources for
economists. There are many more, and the number of available services is
growing with a tremdous speed. Most of this growth is rather chaotic: services
appear, change hosts and disappear. Most of the work is done by a few
volunteers. Most of them are enthusiastic and achieve quite astonishing results
in their work. On the other hand most economists don't know about resources or
are reluctant to use them. Will this change in the near future?
Thorsten Wichmann Technische Universitaet Berlin
References:
Abowd John. W. and Richard Freeman (1990): The internationalisation
of the US labor market, NBER working paper no. 3321.
Figure 1