“The current state of timeliness…of statistics does not bode well for reform outcomes, policy diagnosis, investment decisions…“reads an excerpt from the central bank’s special section in its State of Pakistan’s Economy FY2022-23 Annual Report. That the report went public nearly five months into the new fiscal year is somewhat ironic.
Granted that the aforementioned report is not necessarily a statistical release, but more of an analysis, but more often that not, by the time of release of SBP’s annual State of Economy reports, it seems so dated that it almost looks an exercise in futility, if it was not for the freshly inducted special sections. The section titled “Pakistan’s National Statistical System: A Primer” lays bare the state of affairs of the country’s statistical system from Pakistan’s low global (and regional) rankings in terms of data availability, frequency, timeliness, coordination, openness, and many other factors – while also highlighting demand side gaps, absence of relevant legal framework, and much more.
Needless to say, Pakistan fares poorly on most best practice indicators. As cited in the SBP’s primer, a case in point is Pakistan’s 87th rank (out of 186 countries) in the World Bank’s Statistical Performance Indicators (SPIs) – a framework of five pillars and 22 dimensions. The special section mentions “Statistical Performance Indicator 2022”as the source that puts Pakistan’s overall SPI score at 71.1. This is a marked improvement of 10 points, from the latest available information on the World Bank publicly available data portal on SPI itself, where the latest values pertain to 2019.
As per the data provided in SBP’s primer, Pakistan’s score has doubled in three years (from 30 in 2019 to 60 in 2022 as per SBP) on account of “Data Infrastructure” pillar which is a measure of standards and methods adopted. The lowest score related to the “Data Sources” pillar that measures depth and quality of exercises such as censuses, surveys, administrative and geospatial data. One way to look at Pakistan’s score is that lags regional peers (India and Sri Lanka), but another way to look at is Pakistan is among the fastest improving countries in the region.
Ranking and scores aside, the Primer raises some very pertinent questions that should ideally shape the future discourse of discussion on national statistics in Pakistan. Apart from the most obvious shortcoming of the irregularity of data around surveys and censuses, the performance of provincial statistics bureaus and a glaring lack of effective coordination between various players of the data ecosystem are two of the biggest pain points.
The SBP Primer rightly points out some of the most obvious data gaps that policymakers, think tanks and independent researchers have long been complaining about. These include absence of quarterly GDP despite 18th amendment (Pakistan under the IMFF program is due to come up with quarterly GDP soon), insufficient and irregular employment data, low depth of economic activities tracked for GDP estimation, trade data price element not on monthly basis, and the continued failure to report Producer Price Index.
The state of affairs in livestock and agricultural data reporting has long been lamented by relevant circles, and that continues to limit policymakers’ capacity to identify correct trends – often leading to suboptimal policymaking. On the demand side, the report points to weak demand of data owing to a variety of reasons, including limited financial resources and lack of research skills at the user end.
It is worth mentioning that the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, has a 10-year strategy in place, referred to as the National Strategy for the Development of Statistics (NSDS 2021-30). The rather comprehensive document talks about a number of issues the SBP primer has highlighted – from demand constraints to data gaps and lack of coordination between various public and private data-producing agencies. As is the case with most thing in Pakistan, strategy is usually not the problem, it is often the implementation phase that is. The NSDS for instance, realizes that most data in Pakistan coming from public sources is not user friendly and timely and is scattered – which needs to be aggregated.
The NSDS talks about a web portal under the title of “Statistics Pakistan” to establish a Central Data Bank for Pakistan (2021-22). iii) All statistical organizations will be connected with “Statistics Pakistan” (short term). Data producing organizations will be responsible to regularly update their portals so that latest data could be made available for the use of stakeholders“. This was supposed to be operational last year. Here is hoping the SBP’s timely report on national statistics stirs up the ecosystem and strategies already in place are put to implementation. Till then, let’s go back to converting all the PDF and text files to user friendly formats.
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