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, OECD, UN Comtrade, BIS). 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).

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 (for example 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 live region is Latin America & the Caribbean plus the United States as global benchmark. Primary sources per market:

Economy	Primary source(s)	Domain
Argentina	INDEC · BCRA · Secretaría de Hacienda / MECON	datos.gob.ar · bcra.gob.ar
Bolivia	INE · Banco Central de Bolivia · MEFP	ine.gob.bo
Brazil	Banco Central do Brasil (SGS, Focus) · IBGE (SIDRA) · MDIC (Comex) · OECD	bcb.gov.br · ibge.gov.br
Chile	Banco Central de Chile (Base de Datos Estadísticos)	bcentral.cl
Colombia	DANE · Banco de la República (totoro / SUAMECA) · DIAN · MinHacienda · Fedesarrollo	dane.gov.co · banrep.gov.co
Costa Rica	Banco Central de Costa Rica	bccr.fi.cr
Dominican Rep.	Banco Central de la República Dominicana · ONE	bancentral.gov.do
Ecuador	Banco Central del Ecuador (IEM, IMAEc) · INEC	bce.fin.ec
Guatemala	Banco de Guatemala (Banguat) · MINFIN · SECMCA	banguat.gob.gt
Honduras	Banco Central de Honduras · SEFIN	bch.hn
Mexico	Banco de México (SIE) · INEGI · SHCP	banxico.org.mx · inegi.org.mx
Panama	INEC Panamá · Superintendencia de Bancos	inec.gob.pa
Peru	Banco Central de Reserva del Perú (BCRPData)	bcrp.gob.pe
Paraguay	Banco Central del Paraguay · MEF · INE	bcp.gov.py
El Salvador	Banco Central de Reserva de El Salvador	bcr.gob.sv
Uruguay	INE · Banco Central del Uruguay	bcu.gub.uy · ine.gub.uy
Venezuela	Banco Central de Venezuela · OPEC	bcv.org.ve
United States	BEA (NIPA/ITA) · FRED / St. Louis Fed · BLS · US Treasury · OECD	bea.gov · stlouisfed.org
Barbados	Central Bank of Barbados · Barbados Statistical Service IMF NSDP	imf.org
Belize	Statistical Institute of Belize · Central Bank of Belize IMF NSDP	imf.org
Jamaica	STATIN · Bank of Jamaica IMF e-GDDS	imf.org
Suriname	Centrale Bank van Suriname · ABS · Ministry of Finance IMF e-GDDS	imf.org
Trinidad & Tobago	Central Statistical Office · Central Bank of T&T IMF NSDP	imf.org

Cross-country projections and debt ratios also draw on the IMF World Economic Outlook; commodity prices on the relevant exchange / agency feeds. Caribbean markets currently carry quarterly national-accounts and external coverage via the IMF standardized dissemination standards, with the monthly dashboard in progress.

3 · Refresh cycle

Pipelines run on scheduled GitHub Actions — one workflow per country — that re-fetch from source, re-verify, and commit the refreshed panel daily, aligned to each release calendar. There is no manual data entry in the loop.

• Self-healing: a source outage does not blank the series — the last good value is carried forward and the run flags the gap, so a single failed fetch never corrupts the panel.
• 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. INEGI's IGAE SA, DANE's ISE Cuadro 2, the BCCh Imacec SA), 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). It is validated so that 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.
• 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, 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 (ARS, CLP, BRL, …); dollarized economies (Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama) are in USD.
• 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 2018 = 100); re-based vintages are not spliced across a break without a continuity check on the overlap.
• Real series deflated in-house name their deflator and base period.
• Fiscal sign convention is stated per source (some publish deficit as positive financing need, others as a negative balance); the card follows the issuer.

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. See the AI assistant section for how it works.