The expense of collecting meaningful statistics limits the types of organizations involved in this work. This is also a very elegant way to divide this field. Most every country in the world has a single government agency dedicated to national statistics. These organizations manage the census, watch the movement of money and goods in and out of the country, and undertake a wide range of other surveys. Finding these statistics is relatively straight forward, with several directories on the Internet and certain general national statistics also on the Internet.
Most government agencies collect reams of data on the industries they monitor.
Sometimes these statistics are published, sometimes you have to ask for them, only rarely are they considered private or unavailable. Here in Western Australia, the government departments for Tourism, Labour, Small Business and Big Business all publish top-rate statistics free to interested parties. Tourism also keeps a directory of future tourism related projects. Central to the Internet Revolution is the liberation of just this kind of information. Increasingly, we will see the publishing of such documents on the Internet, but for the few statistics currently online, there is no effective search.