Too Much Data or Not Enough?

The tables in the back of The Economist have always been a source of amazement and amusement - now that they've been reorganized into an even more useful format, the data is better than ever.

But, something does seem to be missing.

It's hard to imagine how this gets compiled and readied for print each week. Surely automation makes the task less onerous than in years past, but someone has to know where all the bits and pieces come from and where they go in the event that a computer glitch stalls the process.

Of course, if mistakes were made, would anyone really notice?

The tables below are now available in the public area of the magazine's online print edition (in the lower right under the heading Economic and Financial Indicators) and they provide a broad picture of nearly all the world's economies.

The first table combines economic growth, industrial production, consumer prices, and employment with a few of the more notable figures highlighted in red.

China, Russia, Indonesia, and Venezuela all post some interesting double-digit numbers for growth or inflation, Venezuela for both. There is a special note about the U.K.'s RPI inflation rate of 4.6 percent - inflation has recently become a sensitive subject across the pond as one newspaper and much of the public now realize that prices are rising faster than what the government's statistics indicate.

It's too bad there's no entry for Zimbabwe.

The trade and budget balances below tell the now well-known story of the global economy - huge trade surpluses by exporters of energy and manufactured goods coexisting with huge trade deficits in the U.S. and U.K., home to two of the world's largest housing bubbles.

Interest rates are rising though Japan's short-term rate sticks out like a sore thumb - a lesson to all those countries with fixed currencies who are thinking about floating them.

That's a lot of information to be sure, but the most intriguing data is what's no longer in the tables. Up until just three months ago, before the major reorganization began where rows and columns were jumbled around making for a generally better presentation, the money supply growth statistics were there right alongside the interest rates.

Money supply growth - the modern-day economist's crazy aunt who lives in the basement - is nowhere to be found. From the Dec. 23rd issue($) under the Money and Interest Rates heading in the lower right, this is what it used to look like.

It must be kind of embarrassing to see all those high single-digit and double-digit numbers near the low single-digit numbers for consumer price inflation.

A query has been submitted to the magazine asking why the money supply growth data has been removed - if any reply comes at all, it will likely indicate that maintaining that dataset is either too costly, not important enough, or both.