SASEBLS Interface Engine

The SASEBLS interface engine enables SAS users to retrieve economic data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website (www.bls.gov), which is hosted by the principal federal agency in the US Department of Labor that measures labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy. The BLS data focus on the US economy in the areas of employment and unemployment, consumer and producer prices, consumer expenditures, import and export prices, wages and other worker compensation, productivity and technological change, employment projections, and safety and health statistics. The economic time series on the BLS website contain observation or measurement periods that are associated with data values.

The SASEBLS interface engine uses the LIBNAME statement to enable you to specify how to subset your BLS data, select according to frequency of the data, and retrieve annual average time series at the specified frequency. You can then use a SAS DATA step to perform further subsetting, retrieve the data, and store the resulting time series in a SAS data set and in a CAS data table (if desired).

The SASEBLS interface engine supports 64-bit Windows and Linux X64 (LAX) platforms.

Note that the SASEBLS engine uses the BLS API, but it is not endorsed or certified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that by using the SASEBLS interface, you are agreeing to comply with the BLS terms of use, which are described on the web page at the following URL: https://www.bls.gov/developers/termsOfService.htm .

To get started using the SASEBLS engine, see the section Getting Started: SASEBLS Interface Engine, which shows how to view the time series data. The sample SAS code for accessing these data appears at the end of that section.