Saturday, May 31, 2025

RIP SBP Data Authenticity ft. Aaj ke hisaab se

Edit: I later found out the mistake was my own. Details in end.

-------------

 Today was the first time, the intertemporal currency value converter I had made a while ago came to my use, when during a phone call with my father, I instantaneously converted a past amount he mentioned to its current value, and I told him about this, and he liked the idea. When I told him, that for present value it's using 2024's last quarter gold prices to compare against historic gold prices, he asked me to get present gold price updated and share it with him. This time, I figured out extracting data from Business Recorder is pretty straightforward using an AJAX call that the webpage was making under the hood.

Last time, I wasn't able to find out a good source for recent data. Since, BR had this data since 2011, I thought about comparing it with the data from SBP that I had used in conversion in my converter, and voila, the two data series are not validating each other.


The price growth rates for the two sources are not even remotely close.

And then they say, I am too paranoid about data sources.

Now, what am I supposed to do plug in my converter? Does authentic data even exist?

-------

Edit 14/07/25: So, I found out the data from both sources is actually consistent. The issue was how I was grouping it. The SBP Handbook explicitly mentioned the years were fiscal years. But when grouping BR data to get annual average, I had grouped by annual year instead of fiscal year. When I grouped BR data by fiscal year, it was pretty much the same.

PS. None of this matters because I think my decision to use gold prices as deflator was pretty stupid one, because gold prices have increased much more sharply then overall prices, probably because demand for gold was not much high pre-2000 but it increased sharply in the next 2 decades; that's my hypothesis. But anyways, I have found old CPI data for Pakistan, and will plug it when I find time.

Any thoughts or questions?

Write to me aiktamseel@gmail.com and I will reply ^_^