What’s new in our Algeria | Macroeconomic report Q1 2020

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.
A quarter that changed the face of the global economy

The first quarter of 2020 saw monumental changes affecting the global economy as the covid-19 pandemic swept across countries and continents, re-writing the rules of trade, travel, employment and investment. Algeria was no exception, with plummeting oil prices and the ‘Great Lockdown’ profoundly altering the country’s economic outlook and ways of doing business.

At Itri Insights, we strive to ensure that each new edition of our Macroeconomic report is fully reviewed, re-evaluated and re-written, steering clear of the widely spread ‘copy-paste’ approach. However, this quarter, perhaps more than any other, has required an almost total re-write of the report as we broke down and analysed this new reality. It also meant reworking all of our macroeconomic models to account for this unprecedented event and its multifaceted impact.

We have revised all of our ‘Deep Dive’ analyses in the light of the covid-19 crisis and included two dedicated sections evaluating the evolution of the pandemic in Algeria and the nature of the current global economic downturn. We have also updated all sections of the report dealing with historical information to include everything up to the arrival of covid-19, in recognition of the importance of this watershed moment.As this is the first edition of the new year, we have also extended our forecasts all the way to 2030, providing additional visibility at a time of strong uncertainty.

Finally, we have pushed our news coverage past the end of the quarter, in recognition of the fact that the short lag between the quarter-end and our publication deadlines can feel much longer during times of rapid change.

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.

As the covid-19 pandemic reached Algeria’s shores, we also created a database dedicated to tracking all available statistics and regulatory changes relating to the virus. This data – which includes everything from health statistics to road traffic data – provides a comprehensive picture of the rapidly evolving situation, even as it continues to unfold. This allows us to maintain a clear line of sight at a time when communicating clear and accurate information has rarely been more important.

We also created an entirely new hotels database to improve our visibility of ongoing construction projects at a challenging time for the building industry, as well as hotel-bed capacity in the country’s paralysed tourism industry.

Adapting to the new data context

Since early 2019, a number of official periodic statistical publications have undergone changes in the frequency and regularity with which they are published. We have continued to adapt to the varying levels of disclosure, particularly from the Bank of Algeria. We have also continued to improve our data collection practices as a whole, integrating additional sources for official and parallel exchange rates.

Click here to find out more about our ‘Algeria | Macroeconomic report Q1 2020’.