Ran into Iraq historian Phebe Marr at a USIP function. She is updating her book, Modern History of Iraq, soon.

Unfortunately, as I told her, my copy of her present book is so coffee stained, dog-eared and written in that I am embarrassed to ask her to sign it. But if you take that book, from the top down, a lot of the bureaucratic and national shifts can be hallmarked (various land and ag reform movements, industrial investment, etc...), so it is a good start point.

From there, I don't think anyone recent has a decent bead on PHYSICAL economics except to follow the Min of Planning's CoSIT reports, and a lot of more recent open source tracking.

I have a few contacts on the ground that usually paint an opposite picture from the "happy talk" government reports, but what I always find interesting is that, despite challenges, folks always try to find their way through, often in informal, barter, local trading, or underground economies that is where most of the action is. In most instances, these patterns and successes follow older patterns, and ingrained logic---it is a lot easier to follow and support those patterns than create new stuff.

One time, despite terrible bandwidth, I downloaded all the US AID Annual Reports from Iraq. Each year since 2003, they describe the economic problems, the plan they developed to address them, and the number of tractors (or center pivots, etc...) they needed to accomplish success. Then they reported on how they had, during the course of the year, executed the plan successfully (Mission Accomplished and the contract payment reciepts to prove it). Then came the next annual report, which identified the economic problems, the steps they planned to take to address them, and so on and so on. Bureaucratic junk. (It still galls me when I hear these types recounting the number of schools, clinics, tractors, etc... as if any of that produced anything with traction).

In Feb 2008, everybody around MND-North was anxiously awaiting a McKinsey Report (via Brinkley) that was supposed to identify the economic way forward---a real economic redevelopment plan. Unfortunately, when it arrived, it was like so many other wasted government consulting contracts. Economic Geography 101 applied from a desk in Washington to a country far, far away. So, you have to take most of these sources with a grain of salt (or less).

Official unemployment in Iraq, for example, ranges from 18% to 40%, depending on who is reporting it for what, but you really have to understand the unofficial economy against a background of government support (food rations, etc...), and sectoral impacts (teens vs. middle aged, etc...) to figure out some type of human condition element---number of destitute, number of satellite dishes, cars, etc... Nobody has it down yet.

Absent any credible sources for metrics, I liked to watch the truck traffic along Route 1---volume, source, content to get windshield info on what was going on, and how much of it. To a trained observer, a Blackhawk is a great way to study land use, ag production, track droughts, etc...

Anything for metrics...

Steve