The freedom to count

This journal starts from a hopeful fact: it has never been easier to study Pakistan with Pakistan's own data. The statistics bureau now puts survey microdata on the web within months of fieldwork. The 2023 census was collected on tablets. The central bank runs an open data portal. A generation ago most of this lived on CDs in Islamabad; today it is a download.

What is still being built is the culture around the data. Public argument about the economy rarely runs on numbers: budgets are debated as politics, a minister will seldom reach for a figure, and the analyst who does reach for one finds it scattered across scanned PDFs that must be linked together before the first calculation. The economic writing that does thrive sits in the business press, and it serves its readers well. But those readers are investors. The questions that matter most for policy are asked less often: who works, who pays, what happens to productivity, and what happens to the poorest. None of this is a failure of talent. It is what scarce, hard-to-use evidence produces, and it changes when the evidence gets easier to use.

Adaad's premise is that the culture can be built, and that the way to build it is to practise it in public. Every month we take one question from economic or social policy, or from the politics that drives them. We work out what the data does and does not show, and we publish the analysis together with the data behind it. If we cannot establish something, we say so. When we get a figure wrong, the correction sits on the story with the old number still visible. Trust in numbers is built by showing how they can be checked, not by being right every time. The full standards we hold ourselves to are on the About page.

Everything here is made to be taken. The prose, the charts and the cleaned datasets are published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0). Translate a piece for an Urdu newspaper. Rebuild a chart for a classroom. Rerun the analysis and publish your disagreement. All we ask is a line of credit and a link to the source. No permission is needed. Data is the rare resource that grows more valuable the more people use it. Every dataset we clean is meant to be the starting point of someone else's work, so that each month the shared pool gets a little deeper and the next argument starts a little further ahead.

Evidence becomes a culture when data becomes a commons.

This first issue opens with what drives growth: output per worker — what the economy produces, divided by the people producing it. Export-led growth has been Pakistan's declared destination for decades, announced in every trade framework and industrial package. The lead story asks why the journey never begins. It finds the answer in the two big household surveys, both newly published and built from tens of thousands of interviews. They describe an economy that grows by adding workers rather than by producing more with each one — a workforce moving off farms into informal services, real wages lower than four years ago, and output per worker lower too. The last two booms ended the same way, running out of dollars before they could settle. The business pages will ask how fast the economy can grow. We are asking whether the growth can survive a shock.

Two companions sit alongside the journal. Data Darbar holds the district-level indicators our charts are built from — census, trade, national accounts and the federal budget. Aiwan-e-Jamhoor maps every National Assembly election since 1977 on the boundaries in force at the time. Read them alongside the journal, and use them to check our work.

This first issue appears on 14 August, to echo the aspirations of those who came before us and to mark a struggle that continues. The fuller freedoms are still being fought for. What this journal can add is a modest but real freedom: data that is free to check, to question and to reuse.

Tell us what we have got wrong, and pitch us what you want counted next. Both make the next issue better. Write to us at editor@adaad.org.