摘要：It is common to classify human behavior as normal or abnormal, but, what about economic behavior? What is a normal growth path for an economy over time? What is an erratic or eccentric growth path? In order to address these basic or primordial questions, eight possible growth states are defined. The countries in the world are classified into these growth states in each of six five-year periods beginning in 1967 and ending in 1996. Provided all the data is available, the results yield a growth path for every country with a total of five transitions from state to state. Employing the data further, conditional relative frequencies of going from one state to another are computed. The conditional relative frequencies are then used to rate the chances of a country walking down its own particular observed state growth path. Countries growth paths are then ranked from normal to abnormal for the entire thirty years based on these ratings.
