Monday, February 19, 2007

World Economic Indicators

The sheer idiocy with which World Economic Indicators was designed still blows my mind. Instead of presenting each country individually, with all its statistics, it presents the information by category. So to get a full overview of the statistics of a country I have to manually assemble all the information. It's ridiculous. The information is exorbitantly priced on the internet, where it is assembled well. Yet my professor (who spent no time going over the information) wants me to assemble and understand all this information within a couple weeks.

I have trouble respecting economists when they aren't able to present information efficiently.

The Penn World Tables are better, but the formatting is still ugly and the appendix is weak.

UPDATE: I brought up the RGDP per capita figures with my professor, attempting to find out exactly how they differed from the RGDP Chain-Series. He couldn't tell me. Anyone able to help out? (We were both apparently too lazy to really research it.)

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