Economic Data Freshness Benchmark

What counts

Each cell asks for one measure:

• GDP growth: Real GDP growth, quarter on previous quarter, seasonally adjusted, not annualized.
• CPI inflation: All-items national CPI inflation, year on year, monthly, unadjusted.
• Unemployment: Unemployment rate, monthly, seasonally adjusted where supplied.
• Trade balance: Merchandise (goods) trade balance, monthly, unadjusted.
• Industrial production: Industrial production growth, year on year, monthly.

A site's reading is exact when it states the concept, transform, frequency and adjustment; exact, unstated when it is the right measure but a qualifier such as the adjustment is not stated; calculated when the site computes the measure from a published series (a year-on-year rate from an index, a balance from exports and imports); different measure when the transform, frequency, scope or adjustment differs. It is current when its period is the newest any of the five sites showed in the window, a lower bound on the publisher's latest release.

A cell counts when the reading is exact, exact but unstated, or calculated, and current. The strict count also requires every qualifier stated and no calculation by the site.

How the pages were read

One reader, 17:04 to 17:09 UTC on 7 Nov 2026 (afternoon): 43 reads of Trading Economics, 23 of Statistics of the World, 7 of World Bank Data, 6 of Our World in Data and 3 of FRED / ALFRED, one page per request, at least six seconds apart on any site, robots.txt read first and obeyed, no cookies, accounts, keys or paid tiers. Pages drawn by JavaScript were rendered in a headless browser; on SOTW's own pages every request to another host, advertising included, was blocked.

FRED's first two pages timed out, so FRED is scored from its pages of 26 October, a floor. World Bank Data and Our World in Data were re-read on five cells each and score from earlier reads elsewhere; neither has monthly or quarterly coverage that counts here. IMF Data is not scored: SOTW does not scrape it.

Every read is in the receipts file: URL, UTC start and end, HTTP status, size and SHA-256 of the body.

What this does not show

One reader on one afternoon, run by one of the sites scored. "Latest period" is the newest seen on any site, not a check of each publisher's calendar, so a release in the days before a run decides several cells, and the same pages read a week later would score differently. Trading Economics' adjustment was judged from its country tables for most GDP and CPI cells, so its strict count is a floor. Nothing here measures whether any figure matches its publisher, how fast a site updates, or uptime.