A nested dictionary of dicts can be passed to a DataFrame as well. The indices of the outer dictionary are taken as the the columns and the inner keys. i.e. the keys of the nested dictionaries, are used as the row indices:
growth = {"Switzerland": {"2010": 3.0, "2011": 1.8, "2012": 1.1, "2013": 1.9},
"Germany": {"2010": 4.1, "2011": 3.6, "2012": 0.4, "2013": 0.1},
"France": {"2010":2.0, "2011":2.1, "2012": 0.3, "2013": 0.3},
"Greece": {"2010":-5.4, "2011":-8.9, "2012":-6.6, "2013": -3.3},
"Italy": {"2010":1.7, "2011": 0.6, "2012":-2.3, "2013":-1.9}
}
growth_frame = pd.DataFrame(growth)
growth_frame