Populating a column with values

[Charles Ngiendo]

I need to populate the empty columns with corresponding values within that year, it could be that I have to repeat the entry of the values (for instance fill up 2004 with the same values-128, 2005-130, 2006-130, 2007-127). Any suggestions of the right code to use? This is just an example, I have observations of over 6 million: 24 countries,

year	country	GDP
2004	SE	128
2004	SE
2004	SE
2005	SE	131
2005	SE
2005	SE
2006	SE	130
2006	SE
2006	SE
2007	SE	127
2007	SE
2007	SE

[Andrew Musau]

Your question is more appropriately posted in the General Forum. This forum is for questions relating to Stata's matrix programming language.

bys country year (GDP): replace GDP=GDP[1]

[Charles Ngiendo]

Hi Andrew,
I tried to apply the command but I did not succeed. Let me explain further. I already have a micro data for the EU countries with individuals nested in households and households nested in countries. I need to add macro variables to the main dataset. The only challenge here is that macro-variables observations do not match what I have on the main data. I need to fill the spaces with the same values per country per year, with an assumption that GDP annual values stays the same. Kindly help out with that.

[Andrew Musau]

Start a new thread in the General Forum, copying and pasting the result of

sort country year
dataex

[Charles Ngiendo]

It worked. I was doing it wrongly. Thanks