Calculators

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Calculators are tools created by various members of the NationStates community to give those that want them some numbers for use as background information in roleplaying. All of them make educated guesses at the national statistics used by the game. There are various kinds of calculators, with budget calculators being the most popular.

Most calculators start with one piece of information: the NationStates XML feed. To access this feed and see exactly what those calculators are pulling their information from take the following URL and paste it into your browser window and change 'YourNation' to whichever nation you would like to see.

http://www.nationstates.net/cgi-bin/nationdata.cgi/nation=YourNation

There is also a regional version of this feed which can be found here:

http://www.nationstates.net/cgi-bin/regiondata.cgi/region=YourRegion

This data is then usually subjected to a variety of formulas to come up with the final data. It should be noted that this data is usually biased in some way - sometimes intentional and sometimes not. Some budget calculators are biased towards economies with high taxes, some are biased towards economies with low taxes; some might be biased towards private ownership, others towards state ownership, and so on. One thing to remember is that all calculators are just tools. They are not the final word by any means and are meant purely to help nations with background material.

One thing to note is that many of the calculators use the same formulas or variants on them to determine the final numbers. Thus you will likely see at least some similarities between calculators in regards to the final numbers.

Another characteristic of nearly every calculator is the lack of correlation between it's results and those alluded to in certain daily UN Rankings.

Links to Calculators

The first php GDP calculator, Pipian's Nationstates GDP Calculator was the first mainstream calculator used on NS, and featured a simple text based GDP and budget report
In addition to GDP, NSEconomy provides information on budgets, exchange rates, and other statistics.
Based on the NSEconomy calculator, NSTracker features added graphs and a historical tracker.
Based on the NSEconomy calculator, NSDossier features added bar graphs, world's largest regions and world's largest nations. Also works for nations in regions larger than 300 nations.