Panel Data - 5 Year Averages
Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:07 pm
Hi there.. I'm new to EViews as my username would suggest!
I'm doing a project on the impact of inequality on economic growth, so I have an excel spreadsheet with data from 1970 to 1994. Because of the scarcity of inequality data I've had to use 5-year averages as there are not observations for every year.
My question concerns the best way to format the data when importing it to EViews. My initial thought was to have the data going down in 5-year gaps for each country, so for example I have the observations for country 1 on the first 5 rows: 1970-74 on the first row (titled 1970), followed by the data for 1975-79 on the next row (titled 1975), and so on, then repeated for the remaining countries.
Is this the best structure? Or should I have a continuous stream of years going 1970, 1971, 1972 etc.. with only observations every five years? This may seem like a silly question, but so far my results have been rather weak and I am trying to make sure there isn't a problem with the way the EViews is reading my data.
Also, will it confuse things if there are not observations for every 5 year period for every country? For example Ghana may have data for only the last two periods.
EViews is probably clever enough to know how to handle all of this (pretty sure its cleverer than I am), but I just wanted to make sure that my weak results are reflecting the data itself, not a problem with how it is presented.
Thanks very much in advance
I'm doing a project on the impact of inequality on economic growth, so I have an excel spreadsheet with data from 1970 to 1994. Because of the scarcity of inequality data I've had to use 5-year averages as there are not observations for every year.
My question concerns the best way to format the data when importing it to EViews. My initial thought was to have the data going down in 5-year gaps for each country, so for example I have the observations for country 1 on the first 5 rows: 1970-74 on the first row (titled 1970), followed by the data for 1975-79 on the next row (titled 1975), and so on, then repeated for the remaining countries.
Is this the best structure? Or should I have a continuous stream of years going 1970, 1971, 1972 etc.. with only observations every five years? This may seem like a silly question, but so far my results have been rather weak and I am trying to make sure there isn't a problem with the way the EViews is reading my data.
Also, will it confuse things if there are not observations for every 5 year period for every country? For example Ghana may have data for only the last two periods.
EViews is probably clever enough to know how to handle all of this (pretty sure its cleverer than I am), but I just wanted to make sure that my weak results are reflecting the data itself, not a problem with how it is presented.
Thanks very much in advance
