The Economic Policy and Business Development (EPBD) Think Tank has launched a public ‘Pakistan Economic Dashboard’ bringing more than 75 years of official economic and social statistics onto a single free digital platform.
The dashboard, launched as an EPBD initiative, aims to address the longstanding problem of dispersion of Pakistan’s economic data across statements, releases and reports of different public agencies.
The platform covers ten subject areas, including GDP and real growth, policy rate, balance of payments, power-sector losses and household living standards, besides a Pakistan Scorecard featuring rankings on governance and economic and social indicators.
According to EPBD, the dashboard brings together long-term statistics on GDP and growth, energy, prices, debt, trade and socio-economic indicators, while identifying changes in methodologies, benchmarks and indices to facilitate meaningful comparison of historical data.
The think tank said no data on the dashboard has been estimated, modelled or filled in, with every figure sourced from official national sources. It added that series have not been chained across changes in base years or definitions.
EPBD said the initiative is intended to save researchers, policymakers, journalists, academics and other users from manually reconciling data from multiple official documents.
The dashboard documents the decisions involved in compiling the historical series and also publishes the underlying data.
The Pakistan Economic Dashboard is available free of charge without subscription or registration and is hosted as a self-contained digital page on the EPBD website. The organisation said it does not make external requests, set cookies or store information in the browser, allowing it to be used even on slow connections or shared computers.
EPBD has invited researchers, academia, students, journalists, policymakers, practitioners, officials and the general public to use the resource and report any errors, inconsistencies or suggestions for further improvement.
