Using GetBCBData to fetch time series from BCB-BGS

Motivation

The Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) offers access to its SGS system (sistema gerenciador de series temporais) with a official API available here.

Package GetBCBData offers a R interface to the API and many other advantages:

• A caching system with package memoise to speed up repeated requests of data;
• User can utilize all cores of the machine (parallel computing) when fetching a large batch of time series;
• Error handling internally. Even if requested series does not exist, the function will still return all results.

A simple example

Let’s have a look at unemployment rates around the world. After searching for the ids in the SGS system, we find the ids for 6 countries and set it as input id.

Now, lets download the data with GetBCBData:

library(GetBCBData)
library(tidyverse)

my.countries <- c('Germany', 'Canada', 'USA', 
                  'France', 'Italy', 'Japan')

my.ids <- c(3785:3790)

names(my.ids) <- paste0('Unemp. rate - ', my.countries)

df.bcb <- gbcbd_get_series(id = my.ids ,
                       first.date = '2000-01-01',
                       last.date = Sys.Date(),
                       format.data = 'long',
                       #series.name = 'ABC',
                       use.memoise = TRUE, 
                       cache.path = tempdir(), # use tempdir for cache folder
                       do.parallel = FALSE)

glimpse(df.bcb)

## Observations: 1,196
## Variables: 4
## $ ref.date    <date> 2000-01-01, 2000-02-01, 2000-03-01, 2000-04-01, 200…
## $ value       <dbl> 8.2, 8.1, 8.1, 8.0, 8.0, 8.0, 7.9, 7.9, 7.9, 7.8, 7.…
## $ id.num      <int> 3785, 3785, 3785, 3785, 3785, 3785, 3785, 3785, 3785…
## $ series.name <chr> "Unemp. rate - Germany", "Unemp. rate - Germany", "U…

p <- ggplot(df.bcb, aes(x = ref.date, y = value) ) +
  geom_line() + 
  labs(title = 'Unemploymnent Rates Around the World', 
       subtitle = paste0(min(df.bcb$ref.date), ' to ', max(df.bcb$ref.date)),
       x = '', y = 'Percentage*100') + facet_wrap(~series.name)
  

print(p)