I am an avid reader of The Economist  because of the quality of the writing, its global perspective and the broad coverage of subjects from the arts to economics.

I also enjoy reading The Economist's excellent Obituary section, but my most geeky admission is that I love checking out the table of economic data under the Economic and Financial Indicators section. This is where The Economist presents a big ugly table of data covering an entire page comparing key economic performance indicators for some 40-odd countries. It is fascinating to see the relationships between different economic indicators for each country and how they differ between countries - it goes to show how surprisingly diverse places are and how they fulfil their economic role and function in such different ways.

This has been the inspiration to the team at .id for producing the National Economic Indicators for Local Areas  in conjunction with our economist partners National Economics.

This on-line resource is 'gold' for anyone seeking information about the economic performance and characteristics of any local area in Australia because it presents and compares key indicators for ALL local government areas across the country and is updated regularly. I particularly like the 'sort' function which enables you to compare areas on the basis of each Indicator. If you are a journalist, an economist or simply a curious person, the National Economic Indicators for Local Areas web application is an awesome resource providing you with hours of entertainment and hypothesising.

But perhaps most importantly, it is the only publicly available resource of its type that is accurate and up-to-date.

I am particularly proud of our latest contribution to providing evidence to local government decision makers and contributing to the discourse about the changing nature of our economy at the local area level.  

Click here to access the site, and enjoy!

Best wishes,