Radical and significant changes taking place in the world economy are obscured by poor GDP data. We provide clear guidance on what is good usable data and what is likely to mislead. We augment official (usable) data with regular quarterly surveys enabling greater data integrity. The chart below shows how our data illustrates the profound changes taking place, with a clarity not available elsewhere:
Economic statistics derived from individual countries (particularly Asian ones in which economic growth is concentrated) frequently seriously underestimate country and continent size, growth and income per capita. Some country data is so bad that it is unusable.
One result of the frequent underestimation (occasionally overestimation) of both GDP and population estimates in developing countries is that the fastest growing markets are often seriously underrepresented in global equity indices.
As the world's biggest hedge fund and asset manager have recently stressed, this reflects missed opportunities for countries and investors.
After more than a decade of sustained research, World Economics has produced a series of new databases that provide a radically different view of the reality of global economic growth in 150+ countries, of great relevance and utility to investors.
World Economics and its parent Information Sciences have for 30 years specialised in developing economic data series that have become part of the financial world's DNA. Almost all significant banks, financial institutions, major corporations and governments have subscribed to our services.
Examples of our work include founding the Purchasing Managers Manufacturing Indexes in 25 countries, the first Eurozone and the first Global Purchasing Managers Indexes (all now owned by S&P Global); the first Country, Region and Global Service Sector Indexes (all now owned by S&P Global), the first harmonised European and Global Media indexes and the World Advertising Research Center (both now owned by Ascential plc); and much more.