A statistical and econometric instrument to measure a province's economic activity simply and in real time has been developed by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), in conjunction with the Secretariat for Planning and Economic Policy of the Province of Santa Fe in Argentina and the Provincial Institute of Statistics and Censuses (IPEC).
The Synthetic Index of Provincial Economic Activity (ISAE), created as part of the Programme of Technical Assistance to Provinces by the ECLAC Office in Buenos Aires, will provide information for diagnostics and the planning and development of public policies, as well as to facilitate economic decision-making of private agents who will be more frequently informed of economic performance in their sphere of action.
Until now, the only quantitative instrument that enabled the government of Santa Fe to find out the aggregate level of economic activity was the gross geographical product formulated annually by IPEC, which did not facilitate a monitoring of the business cycle because of the time frames involved. The new index is available at the following link.
The ISAE index was presented by Ángel Sciara, Minister of Economy in Santa Fe, Jorge Moore, Director of IPEC, and Ricardo Martínez, ECLAC expert. Mr. Sciara emphasized that "this new tool, which is unprecedented as it was created internally, provides public and private decision-makers with an indicator that will provide an almost full report of the business performance of the Santa Fe economy".
The index was produced using statistical series from provincial and national sources and public bodies, based on headings that best represented the economic performance of the province. In this sense, Mr. Martínez stated that "the greatest strength of ISAE is its capacity to predict the present and future ups and downs of economic activity, as well as providing specific information for Santa Fe and the rest of the country using homogenous definitions".
