This paper intends to study the ideational meaning of the abstracts of the economic research papers of English-speaking countries from the perspective of systemic-functional grammar. 50 such abstracts have been collected from the economic journals of English-speaking countries to be used as the data. This study will help the economic researchers, especially, Chinese ones, to write English abstracts of economic papers and, in the meanwhile, prove that functional discourse analysis is effective in studying such discourses.