Methodology

What Mercator measures, where it comes from, and where it does not pretend to be exhaustive.

Mercator is a tracked economic dataset built from public statistical sources plus a small number of editorial layers. It is designed for comparative analysis, not for claiming full global completeness.

Browse countries Deep dives

Tracked countries

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Fully fresh

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Partial coverage

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Fresh blocks

GDP ... · Trade ...
Spending ... · Revenue ...

Coverage rules

How to read rankings and comparisons

Country rankings are computed within the tracked dataset, not across every country in the world.

Freshness filters remove stale or incomplete observations from many headline comparisons.

A rank only means position inside the covered sample for that metric and time window.

If a block is partial, stale, or missing, the UI should surface that rather than imply full comparability.

Sources

By module

GDP and macro baseline

Country totals and headline macro series come primarily from World Bank indicators, with official annual GDP growth preferred when available.

GDP growth uses the official annual growth indicator first, not a recomputation from nominal USD levels.
Budget balance prefers official net lending / borrowing indicators when available.
Debt ratios rely on IMF World Economic Outlook priority logic in the backend.

GDP by industry

Sector structure is assembled country by country from official or quasi-official statistical systems.

Eurostat is used where available for European economies.
Country-specific sources include BEA, ONS, ESRI, and UNSD depending on the economy.
Industry coverage is not equally deep for every country, so cross-country structural comparisons are directional, not perfectly uniform.

Trade

Trade totals and product-level flows come from different datasets with different scopes.

World Bank trade totals may include goods and services.
UN Comtrade bilateral and product breakdowns are goods-only.
Where direct bilateral reporter data exists, it is preferred; mirror data is fallback only.

Public finance

Government spending and revenue come from public-finance datasets with partial country coverage.

Spending is primarily sourced from IMF GFS / COFOG pipelines.
Revenue is primarily sourced from OECD Revenue Statistics.
Some countries use static fallback data when API coverage is missing or unusable, which is less comparable than the main pipeline.

Energy, living standards, and extras

Some secondary modules use specialized external datasets beyond the macro core.

Electricity mix and renewables drilldowns use World Bank and OWID / Ember / Energy Institute-derived series depending on the module.
Some labor or living-standard views rely on OECD or World Bank-derived metrics.
Deep dives include editorial synthesis on top of source datasets and should be read as analysis, not raw database output.

Strategic industries

This module is intentionally presented as approximate and editorial, not as a definitive world ranking.

Strategic industry shares are hand-curated snapshots.
They should be treated as directional market narratives, not audited statistical tables.
They are limited to the tracked dataset and visible source framing should stay explicit.

Limitations

What Mercator does not claim

Mercator is a tracked dataset, not an exhaustive census of the world economy.

Coverage varies by country, block, and year.

Trade visuals can mix a broader country total with goods-only product detail, so scope labels matter.

Older or partial public-finance series exist for some countries even when a country page is available.

Strategic industries and deep-dive narratives include editorial judgment.