EconSkills

EconSkills is a library of 50 reusable, instance-free skills distilled from verified successful trajectories on EconWebArena. Each skill is a parameterized standard operating procedure (SOP) for retrieving a specific kind of live economic figure from an authoritative web portal (central banks, statistical agencies, market data sites, and government fee or benefit schedules). Instance-specific values from the source task (for example a date, country, currency, or ticker) are replaced with placeholders so that a skill applies to a whole family of related questions rather than a single instance.

Each skill is derived from one solved EconWebArena seed task; the file name records that source task id (skill_src<ID>_<name>.json).

Skill Schema

Every skill is a JSON object with seven fields:

Field	Description
name	Short identifier for the skill
purpose	The kind of question the skill answers
preconditions	What must hold before the procedure applies (target portal, required inputs)
procedure	The ordered navigation and extraction steps, with instance values as placeholders
website_guidance	Portal-specific hints (entry pages, filters, download controls)
verification	Checks that the retrieved value matches the requested unit, date, and series
recovery	What to try when a step does not match the current page

Files

• skills/skill_src<ID>_<name>.json contains the 50 skills as individual JSON files.
• skills.jsonl contains the same 50 skills, one JSON object per line, each augmented with source_task_id and file. Convenient for loading with datasets.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

skills = load_dataset("EconWebArena/EconSkills", split="train")
print(skills[0]["name"], skills[0]["purpose"])

Or read the raw files directly:

import json, glob
for path in glob.glob("skills/*.json"):
    skill = json.load(open(path))
    print(skill["name"])

Intended Use

The skills are meant to be supplied to a web agent as optional reference context when it faces a new economic data-retrieval task. They capture the navigation procedure and verification checks for a portal, not the answer to any particular question.

Disclaimer

The target websites are dynamic, so a skill may become outdated and is not guaranteed to work or to yield a correct answer. Letting an agent act on live sites using these skills carries risk, and the skills may be inadvertently misused or lead the agent to the wrong page or incorrect values. Treat the skills as optional hints, supervise the agent, and verify any retrieved value before relying on it. Use at your own risk.

Citation

If you use EconSkills, please cite:

@article{quan2026econskills,
  title={EconSkills: Studying Skill Transfer and Retrieval for Web Agents on Live Economic Data},
  author={Quan, Yinzhu and Liu, Zefang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.19523},
  year={2026}
}

Please also cite the underlying benchmark:

@article{liu2025econwebarena,
  title={EconWebArena: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Economic Tasks in Realistic Web Environments},
  author={Liu, Zefang and Quan, Yinzhu},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08136},
  year={2025}
}