World

Money crossing a border picks up costs that are documented at every step. This section follows them: what a remittance corridor charges and where the charge is disclosed, how a currency peg is defended and what the defence costs, what a freight rate includes, and how a national accounts table assembles figures that were collected by different agencies to different definitions. Each of those is published somewhere, which is where the material starts.

Most of the work is comparison between a published average and a particular case: what one remittance corridor charges against the global figure quoted for all of them, what a central bank spends to hold a rate it has promised, what a national accounts table says about output once the reference year moves, what a container rate covers before the terminal clocks start running. Every entry names the index, report or schedule it reads and the period that document covers, because a figure without its period is not a figure.