st: Panel Data Manipulation, divide all by a group of data??

[Halit Akturk <halitakturk@gmail.com>]

Hi,
I am a Stata 11 user. I am trying to do some data manipulation with a
panel data (long form). Can someone advice me on how to do what I am
trying to do in a more efficient way? I have a panel data of the
following sort:
           column1         column2
CAN     10                     1
CAN     55                     2
CAN     12                     3
UK       11                     4
UK       12                     5
UK       9                       6
USA     16                     7
USA     22                     8
USA     25                     9

What I want to is to divide all values in column 1 and column 2 for
all countries by only the USA values in column 1!
I did this computation in sort of a manual way by basically getting
rid off all wariables other than USA column 1 values and saved that as
a .dta file (say try.dta). Then I merged try.dta with the existing
.dta file I have (above). This produced me a new column (say column 3)
which contains USA column 1 values aligned with CAN and UK and USA
column 1 values. Then I was able to compute by simply manipulating
columns. My method is sort of manual and this requires me to have a
seperate .dta file which I really don't like.
Anyhow, I hope I am clear in explaining what I like to do. I want to
learn whether there is an easier way of doing what I am trying to do
in a more efficient and nicer way.

Thank you all for your help.

Halit Akturk
Department of Economics
Vanderbilt University
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