worldstat.us reads official series, compares each with a published threshold, and turns the result into five states, a set of scores and one regime word. Everything below is the whole method. There is no model, no forecast and no judgement call at build time.
Every series with a status carries a threshold taken from the literature or from the publisher: the Sahm rule's 0.50 points, the Basel Committee's 10-point credit gap, the 100 line of the OECD leading indicator. Where no established rule exists, the threshold is a worldstat.us construction and says so on the indicator page, with the reasoning. Thresholds are fixed in the catalogue and change only with a note on this page.
Some thresholds are relative to the series' own history: initial claims trigger at 15 percent above their twelve-month low, unemployment rates at half a point above theirs, debt service ratios at one point above their ten-year mean. The indicator page prints the level this resolves to today.
A few thresholds require persistence. The yield curve must be inverted for three months, the regional Fed surveys negative for two. Until the condition has held long enough the series is on Watch, with the elapsed time printed.
Two hues in total. Fill, outline and shape carry the state, so the system survives greyscale printing and every form of colour vision.
Each series with a threshold gets a sub-score from its signed distance d to the threshold, positive on the safe side, measured in steps k:
score = clamp(50 + 12.5 · d / k, 0, 100)
On the threshold the score is 50. Four steps clear of it the score is 100; four steps past it, 0. A layer's score within a region is the plain mean of its series' sub-scores. A region's score weights the layers: Cycle one half, Structural one quarter, Stress one quarter. Layers with no scored series are left out and the weights renormalised.
The world score is the GDP-weighted mean of the region scores, using the World Bank's GDP at current US dollars (2025). The same weights order the regions on the front page.
The regime bands on the world score are Expansion at 65 and above, Late cycle from 50, Slowdown from 35, and Contraction below 35. Contraction is additionally held back until at least two regions' labour triggers have fired, so the alarm colour appears only when the labour market confirms it. A region's colour follows the same cut-offs: Green at 65, Amber from 35, Red below.
The site stores a snapshot of every score at every build. Before it had ninety days of its own snapshots, the history was reconstructed by evaluating the method month by month over five years using the data as it stands today. That reconstruction uses final, revised values, so it is smoother than a real-time record would have been; the indicator pages keep the revisions the site has seen since it started. Threshold events older than the site are reconstructed the same way.
The sentences on the front page and the region pages are generated by rules from the evaluated table. "Driven by" names the triggered and watched series with the largest weighted pull below 50; "Offset by" names the clearest series on the safe side. A region sentence names its colour, its weakest layer and that layer's two lowest-scoring series. Every number in a sentence is a number on the page.
A series is current when its latest observation is within the window its cadence allows: ten days for daily data, three weeks for weekly, three months and twenty days for monthly, nine months for quarterly. The coverage badge on the front page names any stale series. A stale series keeps its last state and value; it is never dropped silently.
Six regions and about fifty series. China and India are thin: their activity surveys, credit flows and core inflation are published only as monthly web pages with changing addresses, and are not yet collected. Where a series does not exist for a region the grid shows an em-dash, which is normal, not missing data.