Released Monday, this Census Bureau report provides data on state and local spending for 1999. The data are available as Excel tables and self-extracting .zip files (non-delimited, comma delimited, and coefficients of variation, comma delimited) and cover four main areas of finances: revenue, expenditures, debt, and assets. Revenues are detailed by type and source, and expenditures by function....

The Census Bureau has recently released the fifth edition of the State and Metropolitan Area Data Book, which compares the nation's states and metropolitan areas in everything from banking and births to wages and welfare. Users can view a number of state and metro rankings tables in HTML or download the entire publication in .pdf format. The Data Book also serves as a guide to sources of data from...