Iraq Reconstruction April 2007 Report to Congress

From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction's April 2007 report to Congress, here are some useful trend charts selected from their List of Figures page.

You can click on each chart for a larger, better view.

In this first chart, it would be interesting to break out the trend for imports separately so it could be seen more clearly.


This second chart shows substantial deterioration in average electricity load served over the past year.

In this third chart, it would again be good to separately break out the trend data for Oil Production in the North and the South to make the trends in each of these areas more clearly visible. Stacked charts often obscure the most important underlying phenomena taking place with the individual factors. A separate chart showing the percentage of total oil production accounted for by the South would also would likely be revealing.

In this fourth chart, export levels for crude have recovered to their target value in March 2007. It will be interesting to see how they progress from here on out.


In this final chart, it would be helpful in my view to show each of these factors as a separate bar chart so that the trends at work with that factor could be instantly grasped. This kind of multi-factor bar chart is much harder to understand and interpret since the trends for each factor are interspersed with bars from the other factors. When shown individually, the downward trend for each of these factors would instantly discernible. Showing data points one year apart is also not nearly as good as if each trend had been shown with month by month data points.