CIA's world factbook ( www.cia.gov ) will tell you the leading imports and exports, GDP, and some other relevant data for each country. There likely won't be a lot of analysis. My Geography of the Middle East class used Middle East Patterns by Held and Cummings ( http://www.amazon.com/Middle-East-Patterns-Places-Politics/dp/0813348773 ) which gave a decent overview of each country's economy that was still readable to me (I also majored in anth and was averse to anything quantitative). The English version of Wikipedia's article on GDP links to a number of governmental agencies with statistics.