Last updated: July 2026

Data Sources & Licensing

GeoEcon consolidates seventeen data sources into one analytical platform. This page lists each of them, what it contributes, and the basis on which we use it. We publish it because “where does your data come from?” is the first question any serious buyer asks, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales one.

The analytical backbone is official statistics that are free to redistribute with attribution — the IMF, BIS, US Treasury, UN Comtrade, JODI and national authorities. Commercial feeds are licensed under contract. Third-party research is used the way a research note uses a footnote: short, cited, attributed excerpts shown to signed-in users — never redistribution of the documents themselves.

How to read the labels

Open / officialPublic or official data, redistributable with attribution.
LicensedUsed under a commercial subscription that permits the display shown.
Permission requestedIn use on a cited-and-attributed basis while we seek the publisher's written permission. This is not the same as licensed, and we do not present it as such.
Terms under reviewIn use with attribution while we complete our reading of the publisher's terms.

Official statistics

The structural spine of the platform. Free, attributable, and redistributable — which is why we build on it by preference.

International Monetary Fund

Open / official

World Economic Outlook · COFER reserve composition · International Liquidity & official gold · Balance-of-payments FDI

Published statistical data, retrieved from the IMF's public SDMX API. Redistributed with attribution.

Attribution: Source: IMF

Bank for International Settlements

Open / official

Effective exchange rates · central bank policy rates · locational banking statistics

Published statistical data, public SDMX API. Redistributed with attribution.

Attribution: Source: BIS

US Department of the Treasury

Open / official

Treasury International Capital (TIC) — cross-border holdings of US securities

US Government work — public domain by statute.

United Nations — UN Comtrade

Terms under review

Bilateral merchandise trade, annual and monthly, by product

Public trade statistics via the UN Comtrade API. Commercial display at scale requires the for-profit subscription tier; that upgrade is budgeted and in progress.

Attribution: Source: UN Comtrade

Joint Organisations Data Initiative (JODI)

Open / official

Oil production, trade, and stock levels by country

Open data published by the JODI partner organisations.

Attribution: Source: JODI Oil World Database

ROC Ministry of National Defense (Taiwan)

Open / official

Daily PLA air and naval activity reports — sorties, vessels, median-line crossings

Official daily public bulletins, retrieved directly from the MND Air Force Command.

Attribution: Source: ROC Ministry of National Defense

US Department of Agriculture

Open / official

Production, Supply & Distribution — global agricultural commodity balances

US Government work — public domain by statute.

Chinn-Ito (KAOPEN)

Open / official

Capital-account openness index, 1970–present

Academic index published for public research use, with the authors' requested citation.

Attribution: Chinn, M. D. and Ito, H., 'The Chinn-Ito Index'

European Commission (DG ECFIN)

Open / official

European economic forecasts and country reports

Reusable under the Commission's public reuse policy, with attribution.

Attribution: Source: European Commission

US Federal Reserve Board

Open / official

Research and international finance discussion papers

US Government work — public domain by statute.

Commercial and market feeds

Paid or publicly published market data, displayed under the scope each provider permits.

EODHD Financial APIs

Licensed

Foreign-exchange rates · country equity ETFs · digital assets · oil-tracking ETFs

Commercial subscription permitting in-application display to authenticated users. Sovereign bond yields are NOT included at any EODHD tier and are not displayed from this source — see the note below.

NewsAPI.ai / Event Registry

Terms under review

Global news headlines and article metadata used for topic monitoring

Commercial subscription. We display headlines, publisher attribution and AI-generated summaries — never full article text. Redistribution scope is being confirmed in writing.

Google (Gemini)

Licensed

Language-model analysis and live web-grounded citation trails

Commercial API under Google's terms. Grounding results are live web search, cited to their originating publishers.

Polymarket

Terms under review

Prediction-market contract prices and event odds

Publicly available market data, displayed with attribution and cited as Polymarket. Reuse terms are being reviewed.

Attribution: Source: Polymarket

SWIFT

Permission requested

Global Currency Tracker — currency shares of international payments

Figures extracted from SWIFT's freely published monthly tracker and re-rendered as our own charts. We do not redistribute the publications. The tracker asserts copyright and grants no reuse; a permission request is in progress.

Attribution: Source: SWIFT Global Currency Tracker

Heritage Foundation

Terms under review

Index of Economic Freedom — overall score and twelve components

Published annual index, displayed with attribution and presented as one institutional-quality lens rather than ground truth. Reuse terms are being reviewed.

Attribution: Source: The Heritage Foundation, Index of Economic Freedom

A note on sovereign bond yields. Government bond data is excluded from our market-data subscription at every tier, so we do not display it from that provider. Sovereign yields are being re-sourced to official publishers — the Federal Reserve's FRED, the European Central Bank, and national central banks — which is both the correct licence position and the better primary source.

Research archive

Published third-party analysis, retrieved to inform answers and quoted in short attributed excerpts with the document title, institution and date. The documents themselves are never redistributed, never served as files, and never offered for download.

European Commission · US Federal Reserve Board · Congressional Research Service · NBER · CIGI · USITC · US Department of Defense

Open / official

Published research used as short attributed excerpts

Permissive terms or US Government works. Quoted with attribution.

International Monetary Fund

Permission requested

Article IV consultations, World Economic Outlook and Fiscal Monitor editions

Published research quoted as short attributed excerpts. A licensing channel exists and permission is being pursued for continued commercial use.

Institute for the Study of War, with AEI's Coalition Defense of Taiwan

Permission requested

China-Taiwan Weekly Updates — cited, linked, and scored for narrative tension

Quoted and cited with attribution, which ISW's policy expressly permits. We have stopped incorporating new ISW material into our search index pending written permission; current use is citation, linking, and analysis.

Attribution: Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Coalition Defense of Taiwan

Center for Strategic and International Studies

Permission requested

Taiwan blockade and invasion wargames — the published parameters behind the Scenario Lab

Short page-cited quotations plus published numeric findings, displayed with provenance on the surface itself. Permission for continued commercial use is being sought.

Attribution: Source: CSIS

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Permission requested

Research on the economic effects of armed conflict over Taiwan

Quoted as short attributed excerpts. The licence requires written permission even for excerpts; a request is in progress.

RAND Corporation

Permission requested

Taiwan and strategic-competition research — cited by title and finding

RAND publications are provided for noncommercial use only. We have removed RAND full text from our search index entirely; the work is now referenced by citation only.

Attribution: Source: RAND Corporation

Council on Foreign Relations · PIIE · Atlantic Council · Global Taiwan Institute · Chatham House · Rhodium Group and others

Terms under review

Published analysis used as short attributed excerpts

Quoted with attribution under a short-excerpt basis. Terms are inventoried per publisher and reviewed individually.

How we handle attribution

  • Every figure drawn from a dataset carries its provider label in the answer text itself — never blurred into a generic “market data” credit.
  • Every chart, table and exported report carries a provenance caption: source, the period the data covers, and when it was retrieved.
  • Every archive excerpt is cited with its full document title, institution and date, so a reader can go to the original.
  • Where a publisher stipulates exact attribution wording, that wording is shown above and is the form we use.

Corrections and rights enquiries

If you are a publisher or data provider and believe your material is represented incorrectly here, or used outside the terms you intend, we want to hear about it and will act on it. Write to [email protected].