I often have the need to pull some economic data from various sources and do a bit of analysis in Excel or whatever. With time-series data especially, it is a pain to pull the new data when a new data point is released (every quarter or whatever) and refresh the analysis. It would be very helpful if there was a standardised format like RSS for data feeds. Then, if it were supported in Excel, I could plug my spreadsheet into that feed and know that my data would be automatically updated.

It doesn’t seem very hard to do, since time series are pretty simple. At a minimum, a feed would just need to contain a description, and then a list of (date, value) pairs comprising the data series. Then all that’s needed is a protocol for publishing and fetching feeds, which could probably work exactly like RSS.

I did a bit of searching, and companies like EcoWin are selling data feeds in some kind of proprietary format, and there are obviously many providers of financial data feeds. What would be more useful is if national statistical agencies and the OECD etc supported a common format and used it to publish the data that they currently provide in less-convenient form on their websites.