The Economist Guide to Global Economic Indicators.

• Author: Kraft, Bonnie Ridley

Whether you are looking for the terse, tongue-in-cheek dialogue of The Economist magazine or a concise, condensed version of international and domestic economics, The Economist Guide to Global Economic Indicators is your reference guide. This highly concentrated dose of economic information is particularly timely for the professional finance officer, as well as the college student. Beyond that, it is for anyone who needs a key to translating the techno-babble of economics into an interpretation of the daily headlines.

In one sense, this book is a primer, being easy to follow and understand. Due to the in-depth subject matter, however, it is not Economics 101; rather, it presents a view of international business through the technical filter of economic data.

The layout of the book is logical, presenting first things first, which is necessary (if a bit tedious) for a complete understanding of what follows. The four opening chapters discuss how to interpret economic indicators from a global perspective. They provide the "essential mechanics," that is, the mathematics that underlie many economic indicators. So bring your calculator. For those readers who wish to understand thoroughly the mechanics of it all, some spreadsheet formulae are provided for the more complex calculations. Common pitfalls and traps are revealed so that data interpretation can be questioned logically. Finally, the beginning chapters stress the criticality of interpreting economic measurements in context.

Following the baseline chapters, the reader can move through the book in any order by topic of interest. It is very well indexed, so it is quite easy to find any desired area of information, whether it be a certain country or a specific topic, such as GDP or the J-curve effect. (If you do not know what these are, you can look them up in the book.) The way the information is presented makes the difficult subject matter relatively easy to follow. Under each discussion of a topic area is included a bullet-point description of

* Measure: what is being measured,

* Significance: why it is important,

* Presented as: how it is numerically captured and displayed,

* Focus on: what is being shown by data,

* Yardstick: what is the norm or baseline against which the measurement is being taken and

* Released: how often information is available and any time lag.

Following that...