What’s new in our Algeria | Macroeconomic report Q2 2019

The ‘What’s new’ section is designed to:

  • Shed light on the continual ‘behind-the-scenes’ work that goes into improving our macroeconomic research and analysis. This might include improvements to our data collection processes, changes to our forecast methodologies, etc.
  • Enable our long-standing partners to easily identify any changes and understand why things have changed.
  • Allow us to flag-up significant changes.

New additions to the report

At least 80% of each quarterly macroeconomic report is made up of entirely new material. We focus on the latest developments on the ground in Algeria. So when you sign up for an annual subscription, you won’t get a ‘copy-paste’ report with lots of general theory, but rather real insights into the evolving macroeconomic and business environment.

We’ve also added a new section under the title ‘How we fared last quarter’ to each of our macroeconomic indicators. This section allows us to:

  • Hold ourselves accountable for our figures. If we correctly identified an emerging trend in previous quarters, we want to explore why we got it right. Likewise, if we missed a trend, we want to underline it and explain why things turned out differently than expected.
  • Calculate our margin of error so we can keep track of our performance and improve.

This quarter, we have developed a new model to allow us to provide timely estimates of quarterly foreign trade figures, as well as a breakdown of the major import and export categories. Since mid-2018, Algeria’s customs authorities have been reorganising the way they process and communicate official figures. As a result, data availability can fluctuate significantly from one month to the next. Our new model ensures that we can provide a consistent level of detail, each and every quarter. That way, you’ll know exactly what data you can expect to find, as well as where to find it.

We have also streamlined our analysis of foreign trade statistics, to move away from providing a ‘data dump’ (large, unwieldy sets of raw data) and towards more easily digestible, value-added analysis.

In addition, in Q2 2019, we have added a detailed breakdown of GDP by industry sector for the most recent quarter. This change is part of our longer-term goal of adding depth and insight to our report, without creating unnecessary noise.

We have also made some small tweaks to improve even further the transparency of the data used in our reports. Thus, we have added notes and commentary on its nature, whether it’s from an official, an unofficial or in-house source, and on its type, whether it corresponds to actual figures, estimates or forecasts.

Improvements behind the scenes

As we do every quarter, we have updated our macroeconomic models with all of the new and pertinent data we have collected from a range of local and international sources since our last publication.

We have also improved our in-house tracking systems, allowing us to:

  • Obtain accurate data from a wider range of sources and improve the accuracy of our forecasts.
  • Cross-check our own forecasts against those of other sources to see how we compare.

Click here to find out more about our ‘Algeria | Macroeconomic report Q2 2019’.