Economic output and retail sales

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Industrial production for the euro area, the EU and seven member states, alongside the UK's monthly GDP index, manufacturing output and retail sales volume. The activity side of the macro picture, on the same row shape as the labour and inflation datasets.

Industrial production is the series that tells you whether a manufacturer's order book is a company story or a cycle story, and the UK's monthly GDP index is one of the few genuinely monthly GDP measures any statistics office publishes.

Retail sales volume is included because it is the demand-side counterpart: volumes rather than values, so it is not flattered by the inflation dataset next door.

Available Data Points:

  • Period Date: The period the value describes — what the number is about (the valid clock).
  • Published At: When the value first became knowable — when the publisher released it (the knowledge clock). Filter on this for anything where look-ahead bias would matter.
  • Value: The numeric value, where the series has one.
  • Value Text: The textual value, for categorical series such as a trial's status or phase.
  • Unit: Unit of the value, e.g. vehicles, percent, USD.
  • Value Type: number, percent, currency, count or text.
  • Frequency: How often the publisher releases the series.
  • Market: The market the reading describes — an ISO-3166 alpha-2 code (DE), a sub-national one (US-CA), a supranational aggregate (EA, EU) or GLOBAL.
  • Series Slug: Which series the reading belongs to. Unique within a publisher, not globally.
  • Series Name: Human-readable name of the series.
  • Source Slug: Publisher/feed identifier, e.g. kba_registrations.
  • Source Name: Human-readable name of the publisher or feed.
  • Publisher: Who publishes the underlying data.
  • Entity Ref: The publisher's own identifier for what the reading is about — a manufacturer name, a securitisation trust, a reactor unit, a country code. Kept so any value can be traced back to the row it was parsed from.

This dataset describes a market, not a company

Every reading here is about a country or a whole market, so there is no ticker in the path and no instrument in the response envelope. That is deliberate: attaching a national print to a listing would be a claim the data does not support. Read it as the context the company-level endpoints are measured against.

Coverage

Eurostat's industry-excluding-construction index, seasonally and calendar adjusted, 2021=100, for the euro area, the EU and Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Poland. Plus three ONS series for the UK: the monthly GDP index, manufacturing output and retail sales volume.

Monthly. Eurostat's industrial production lands about 45 days after the reference month; the ONS series between 20 and 42.

What to look for

These are index levels, not growth rates. Compute the change yourself over whichever horizon you want, and keep the base year in mind when comparing countries — every Eurostat series here is on 2021=100, but the ONS ones are on their own bases.

Retail sales volume is deliberately a volume measure. Reading it next to the inflation dataset answers whether spending rose because people bought more or because things cost more.

Industrial production is revised. As everywhere in this dataset, publishedAt is what makes the revised and the originally-published views separable.

Two dates on every reading, and the difference is the edge

periodDate is what the number is about. publishedAt is when it first became knowable. The gap between them is the whole point of alternative data — and it is also the trap. A Form 10-D describing July is filed in mid-August, so a backtest that treats the period as the knowledge date reads a document six weeks before it existed.

from_date and to_date filter on periodDate, because that is the axis you plot against. Join on publishedAt when you are joining against returns.

Filtering: one market or all of them

Called with no filters, the endpoint returns every series in the dataset, for every market ORTEX covers it in. Each row names its own market, seriesSlug and sourceSlug, so a single request is enough to chart the whole dataset.

Narrow it with any combination of market (one market), series (one measure) and source (one publisher). Filter values that are each valid but select nothing together return 400 invalidSelection rather than a misleading empty result.

A series slug identifies a series within a publisher, not globally

unemployment_rate is published under that exact slug by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the UK Office for National Statistics and Statistics Canada. Where a slug names more than one series in a dataset, passing it alone returns 400 invalidSeries listing the alternatives — pair it with market or source. ORTEX would rather refuse than hand you one country's print labelled as another's.

How much history there is

Several of these publishers overwrite their own pages and keep no archive. Where that is so, the series begins on the day ORTEX started capturing it and lengthens from there — nobody, including the publisher, can supply the days before that. Everything ORTEX has ever fetched is archived on capture, so the series only ever grows.

Try it out! You can test the API with the trial key TEST. Simply include it in your request headers; either here, or add the header "Ortex-Api-Key": "TEST" to your http request.

Trial key restrictions: Trial keys may be limited to a specific date range and set of regions. Requests outside the allowed regions or entirely outside the allowed date range are rejected; a date window that partially overlaps the allowed range is trimmed to it, reported in meta.restriction.

Get full access! Get a key at app.ortex.com/apis

Query Params
string

Restrict the response to one market. Case-insensitive. This endpoint covers: DE, EA, ES, EU, FR, GB, IT, NL, PL, SE. Omit it to receive every market at once - the rows carry their own market, so one request is enough to chart all of them. An unrecognized value returns 400 invalidMarket naming the accepted set.

date
required

Inclusive start of the returned date window. Format: YYYY-MM-DD.

date

Inclusive end of the returned date window (defaults to today). Format: YYYY-MM-DD.

string

Restrict the response to one measure within this dataset. Case-insensitive. Carried here: industrial_production_ea, industrial_production_eu, industrial_production_de, industrial_production_fr, industrial_production_it, industrial_production_es, industrial_production_nl, industrial_production_se, industrial_production_pl, gdp_monthly_index, retail_sales_volume, manufacturing_output. Omit it to receive every measure. A slug is unique within a publisher rather than globally, so where several publishers in this dataset use the same one, pair it with market or source - an ambiguous slug returns 400 invalidSeries naming the alternatives rather than guessing which country you meant.

string

Restrict the response to one publisher. Case-insensitive. Feeding this endpoint: eurostat_macro, ons_macro. Most useful as the disambiguator for a series slug more than one publisher uses. An unrecognized value returns 400 invalidSource naming the accepted set.

integer

Page number within the paginated result set. Must be >= 1. Defaults to 1.

integer

Number of rows per page. The default and the maximum allowed depend on the API tier; a value above the tier maximum is rejected with 400 invalidPageSize.

string
enum
Defaults to json

Response format. "json" (default) or "csv".

Allowed:
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string
enum
Defaults to application/json

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