Every figure on PEIC traces back to a named official source and a stated update schedule. Where a source doesn't actually back a number — or only informs it indirectly — this page says so, rather than implying a live feed that doesn't exist.
SBP — State Bank of Pakistan
20 indicators via the SBP EasyData API: foreign reserves, bank reserves, USD/PKR, policy rate, CPI inflation, core inflation, WPI inflation, 3-month T-bill and 3-year PIB yields, remittances, current account, trade balance, money supply (M2), exports, imports, FDI inflows, REER, large-scale manufacturing (LSM), private credit growth, and the fiscal balance.
Monthly-release series (CPI, reserves, balance of payments, etc.) are revalidated every 24 hours; series that can move on any business day (the policy rate, T-bill/PIB auction yields, weekly M2, private credit growth) revalidate every 6 hours.
Raw units are converted for readability (e.g. millions to billions of USD for reserves, trade, and remittances). LSM is published as a quantum index, so its year-on-year growth rate is computed here as (latest / same_month_last_year − 1) × 100. For six indicators where PBS publishes first (CPI, core inflation, LSM, trade balance, exports, imports), a newer PBS figure overrides SBP's own value once it lands, since PBS releases these 1–30 days ahead of SBP's own EasyData update depending on the series.
The dashboard falls back, in order: the most recent successfully-ingested value, then a last-known-good cached value regardless of age, then a static snapshot as a final resort — each state is visibly labeled on the indicator, never presented as live when it isn't.
PBS — Pakistan Bureau of Statistics
The monthly CPI release (headline, core/NFNE, and the 12-group category breakdown that powers the Personal Inflation Calculator), the weekly Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI), and advance releases of LSM, trade balance, exports and imports.
PBS publishes CPI on the 1st of each month and SPI every Friday. PEIC checks for new releases every 15 minutes, with tighter 5-minute polling in the windows around known publication times.
CPI figures are extracted directly from PBS's published Monthly Inflation Report PDF and SPI from its published spreadsheet — never scraped from a rendered web page. The extraction explicitly checks that a matched figure is labeled year-on-year rather than month-on-month before accepting it, and the 12-group category breakdown is validated (all groups present, weights summing to roughly 100, plausible YoY range) before being stored.
The weekly SPI figure has no static fallback — it simply doesn't update rather than show a stale or invented number. The monthly CPI figures fall back to whatever SBP EasyData is separately reporting for the same period.
PSX — Pakistan Stock Exchange
There is no direct PSX/KSE-100 feed on PEIC today — a live KSE-100 index feed requires a commercial PSX data license. In its place, the platform shows the Global X MSCI Pakistan ETF (NYSE: PAK), a US-listed fund that tracks Pakistani equities and correlates with KSE-100 performance, sourced free from Yahoo Finance.
Revalidated hourly.
Shown as-is (price and change); no index-level conversion is applied since it isn't standing in for a specific KSE-100 value, only its general direction. If the ETF's price data goes more than 30 days without updating — a sign it may have been delisted — it's dropped rather than shown stale.
Falls back to the last successfully-fetched value, then a static snapshot.
IMF — International Monetary Fund
There is currently no automated IMF data feed anywhere in the platform. Where IMF figures appear — for example, reserve-adequacy benchmarks referenced in the Lab's explanatory copy — they are manually transcribed from IMF publications, not fetched live.
TODO: decide whether to build a live IMF data connection (e.g. IMF SDMX/IFS) or keep IMF as a manually-curated reference source only, and update this section — and the homepage's data-sources list — once that's settled.
World Bank
GDP growth (annual %) as a headline indicator; population, and the agriculture/industry/services shares of GDP are also fetched but only the latter three are currently surfaced, in the cross-country Comparisons tool, as a substitute for stock-market sector data that has no available source for Pakistan.
Revalidated every 24 hours — the underlying indicators are themselves only updated by the World Bank a few times a year.
Used as published, with no unit conversion.
GDP growth falls back to a last-known-good cached value regardless of age, then a static snapshot. Population and the sector-composition series have no static fallback and simply don't render if the live fetch fails.
Uses PBS's own official 12-group CPI basket (Food & Non-Alcoholic Beverages, Alcoholic Beverages & Tobacco, Clothing & Footwear, Housing/Water/Electricity/Gas & Fuels, Furnishing & Household Equipment, Health, Transport, Communication, Recreation & Culture, Education, Restaurants & Hotels, Miscellaneous) — the same groups and year-on-year rates PBS publishes each month, never a custom or invented basket.
You enter how your own spending splits across those 12 groups (as percentages, or as PKR amounts that are converted to percentages of your total). Your rate and the official rate are both computed the same way — each group's year-on-year inflation rate, weighted by a spending distribution:
personal or official rate = Σ (group's weight% ÷ 100) × (group's YoY inflation%)Your result uses your entered weights; the official CPI benchmark uses PBS's own published weights for the average household — same formula, different weights. The gap between the two is broken down by category, and the categories responsible for the largest share of that gap are surfaced as the "top drivers." A difference smaller than 0.3 percentage points is treated as "in line with" the national average rather than meaningfully higher or lower, to avoid reading too much into rounding-level noise.
A deterministic 0–100 score — not an AI estimate — averaged across up to six categories, each a plain formula over numbers you've already entered into the Lab's other calculators. A category is only included once you've given it enough to work with, so using one tool still produces an honest partial score rather than a padded one.
| Category | Formula | Needs |
|---|---|---|
| Personal Inflation | 100 − max(0, your rate − 5) × 6 | Your personal inflation rate |
| Inflation Exposure | 75 − (your rate − official rate) × 8 | A real household allocation (not just the CPI default) |
| Budget Balance | 50 + savings rate% × 2, where savings rate = (income − spending) ÷ income | Monthly income and spending |
| Purchasing Power | 100 − income erosion% × 8 | Recent real-income erosion |
| Salary Growth | 50 + real raise change% × 10 | A recorded raise above 0% |
| Savings Protection | min(100, months of spending covered ÷ 6 × 100), minus a penalty above 10% projected erosion | Savings amount and monthly spending |
Every category score is clamped to 0–100. The overall score is the plain average of whichever categories have enough data, rounded to the nearest whole number. Categories scoring 70 or above are called out as strengths; categories below 50 are called out as weaknesses.