How the data is sourced, verified and refreshed

1 · Primary-source policy

We do not re-sell aggregated feeds. Each indicator pulls from the primary issuer — the national statistics office, the central bank, the finance ministry, or a multilateral of record (IMF, Eurostat, BIS, UN Comtrade). Where a central bank and a statistics office both publish a series, we take the one that is the official release for that concept (e.g. CPI from the statistics office, the policy rate from the central bank).

Primary sources come first; harmonized multilateral layers — Eurostat for Central & Eastern Europe and the IMF SDMX feeds for the Gulf, Sub-Saharan, CIS and MENA anchors — provide a comparable baseline and a fallback, never a replacement for the national release. Every series carries its provenance on the card: the issuing institution, the specific table or dataset code, the base year, and the source URL. When a value is derived (a real series deflated by CPI, or a trade balance built from exports minus imports), the card says so and names its inputs.

2 · Sources by country

The region is Emerging Europe, the Middle East & Africa plus the United States as global benchmark. Primary sources per anchor:

Cross-country projections and debt ratios also draw on the IMF World Economic Outlook; commodity and terms-of-trade series on IMF PCPS/CTOT and the relevant exchange feeds; trade on UN Comtrade. The IMF SDDS Plus / e-GDDS NSDP landing pages are used as the source directory that points to each economy's authoritative machine-readable feed.

3 · Refresh cycle

Pipelines run on GitHub Actions — one workflow per country — that re-fetch from source, re-verify, and commit the refreshed panel. During the EEMEA beta these runs are dispatched on demand against each release calendar rather than on a fixed schedule, so a refresh is deliberate and reviewable; scheduled automation is enabled at launch. There is no manual data entry in the loop.

• Self-healing: a source outage does not blank the panel — each national overlay is wrapped per series, so a single failed fetch never takes down the country card; the last good value is kept and the run flags the gap.
• Deterministic aggregates: cross-country indices (heatmaps, nowcast inputs, the MCP catalog) are re-projected from the committed country files on every run, so they never drift from the underlying data.
• Detected dates: each print records both its reference period and the date it was ingested, surfaced in the terminal's "Latest Updates".

4 · Seasonal adjustment

Many activity, trade and monetary series are seasonal. We are explicit about which adjustment a chart shows, tagged per series:

• Official SA — where the issuing institution publishes a seasonally adjusted series (e.g. Eurostat's SA activity and trade series for the CEE anchors, or a national SA release), that official series is used and labelled as such. The non-adjusted original is kept alongside it.
• Own SA (X-11-style) — where the source publishes only the original (NSA) series, a documented ratio-to-moving-average X-11-lite adjustment is computed in-house, tagged own_sa, and recomputed from the NSA on every run (never chain-linked). NSA is kept as <id> (or <id>_nsa) and the derived SA as <id>_sa. It is validated so the annual mean of the SA series tracks the NSA (unbiased) while removing the seasonal signature.

Both the seasonally adjusted and original series are retained wherever the source allows, so you can see the adjustment rather than take it on faith.

5 · Accounting identities

National-accounts and external blocks are verified to close, not just displayed:

• Balance of payments — BPM6. Current, capital and financial accounts follow the IMF BPM6 framework; the current-account and financial-account contribution charts are built from the component series, and the identity is checked against the published aggregate. Where a source exposes only credit and debit legs, the total is reconstructed as credit minus debit.
• National accounts. Quarterly GDP is carried on both the expenditure side (C, G, gross fixed capital formation, change in inventories, exports, imports) and the production side (value added by sector), with the expenditure identity verified to close on the nominal series. Real chain-linked series can be mildly non-additive; where a source documents this (e.g. reference-year-suffixed volume units), we do not force the real identity.
• Fiscal. Where sub-aggregates are published (revenue by tax, spending by function), the components are checked to sum to the headline before wiring.

6 · Unit & convention notes

• Local currency is labelled with each country's ISO-4217 code (PLN, CZK, HUF, RON, TRY, ZAR, NGN, EGP, RUB, …); the Gulf pegs (SAR, AED, QAR) and every level are stated on the card.
• Percent series are stored as the percentage number (a 4.1% print is 4.1, not 0.041), so cross-country comparisons line up.
• Index series carry their base year on the card (e.g. base 2015 = 100); re-based vintages are not spliced across a break without a continuity check on the overlap.
• Comparison across countries matches on a canonical indicator id (activity_index, cpi_index, fx_reer_index, …), not on a national label, so the compare and momentum views line up like for like.
• Monetary-stance honesty. A policy rate older than 90 days is badged stale with its as-of date and excluded from stance highlights; each country carries a regime flag — inflation targeter (with its target), FX peg, or other — so a real-rate or Taylor reading is never shown out of context.

7 · AI-readable by design

The same verified catalog is exposed to AI assistants over an open Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector, so the numbers an assistant reasons over are exactly the ones in the terminal — same sources, same units, same freshness. The EEMEA endpoint is https://eemea.australmacro.com/mcp (connector name austral-macro-eemea). See the AI assistant section for how it works.