Shapefiles in EViews

EViews offers the ability to open shapefiles as a geographic map which may then be tied to the data in your workfile.

Shapefiles are an open file format developed by Esri as a data storage for GIS software. Wikipedia has a complete description of the history and specification of shapefiles.

It should be noted that shapefiles are made up of a number of individual files:

• Shape format (.shp).
• Shape index format (.shx).
• Attribute format (.dbf).
• Spatial index format (.sbn).

EViews requires all of these files to open a shapefile.

Where to find Shapefiles

The shapefile format is extremely popular and widely used. As such finding shapefiles is relatively simple using a search engine such as Google.

Alternatively, there are a number of sites that provide shapefiles for specific geographic areas, such as:

• US Census for USA maps
• Eurostat for European maps
• Esri also maintain a huge list of shapefiles for geographical areas covering the whole world.