Preparing the Compare Stub File

To use Compare, one first prepares a “stub” file, which is a text file that provides a description of the series to be printed, the format for printing, titles, dates and other information. Our stub files usually have the extension “.STB”, but this is not necessary.

The following is a sample of a basic stub file. All commands in the sample, and many others, will be explained in this section.

\dates 2007.0 2008.0 2007.1 2007.2 2007.3 2007.4 2008.1 2008.2 2008.3 2008.4
;
;               THE AMI MODEL
;
&
;
gnp$                       ;Gross National Product
c$                         ;Personal Consumption
pibg$                      ;Personal Income w/o Govt
pidis$                     ;Personal Disposable Income
taxrate*100                ;taxrate*100
gtnis$                     ;Govt Trans, Net Int, Sub
cpc$                       ;Consumption per Capita
pop*1000                   ;Population (Millions)
100*(gnp$-gnp$[1])/gnp$[1] ;GNP Growth Rate