As salam ale kum and Hello everyone.
I am a Ph.D. Economist with specialization in Monetary, Development and International Economics. My Ph.D. is from Western Michigan University, which is situated in the beautiful city of Kalamazoo in Michigan, United States of America. I endeavor to keep up with the developments in the world of artificial intelligence and usually my work is at the cross-section of economics and machine learning.
This is my personal webpage. In the following section, you will find my brief introduction about myself.
I am currently working as Deputy Director in the Economic Modelling team at the Research department in State Bank of Pakistan, the central bank of Pakistan. Details about my education, professional experience, publications, etc. can be accessed through my CV, which is publicly available by clicking on CV tab below.
“Easydata-MD: A Monthly Dataset for Macroeconomic Research on Pakistan” with Mr.Hassan Raza and Mr. Mohsin Waheed Accepted and Forthcoming at The Lahore Journal of Economics on 22-02-2024
Abstract:
This paper introduces a large dataset 1 , at monthly frequency, for conducting empirical macroeconomic analysis and forecasting for the economy of Pakistan. For this purpose, we use the recently launched database of the Central Bank of Pakistan, known as Easydata. Our contribution is timely as well as important because at the present time, there is not a single database on Pakistan's economy that provides an opportunity to the researchers from policy circles as well as academia to verify and compare results using the same set of variables and a common sample. Our endeavor provides a solution to this issue. Since this is the first time such a dataset is compiled, we perform a forecasting exercise using the conventional econometric models and the latest machine learning algorithms. On balance, we find that the machine learning models outperform the benchmark model and the regression model based on factors. Furthermore, we find that the dataset has a higher ability to predict the external variables, which may be because Pakistan's economy has had balance of payment issues for long and policy focus has remained as addressing this problem.
Publicly available data:
Original Dataset of the paper: Please click the tab below to download the original dataset of the paper. We hope that you will use this dataset and the literature using the same set of variables and sample period will lead to beginning of a competitive macroeconomic research culture in Pakistan.
Note: The most recent data will be upload every quarter. Therefore, the first updated dataset will be available on March 1, 2024, which will contain data upto the most recent update on the Easydata platform of the State Bank of Pakistan.
Disclaimer: The dataset is built by borrowing key macroeconomic indicators from the Easydata of SBP. The authors neither intend to claim ownership to the official dataset nor claim that this is an official dataset to be used by researchers across Pakistan for conducting studies on Pakistani economy. Views presented here are of the authors and do not represent views of the SBP. This dataset may not be mis-represented as/cited as dataset of SBP, instead be cited as “Syed, Raza and Mohsin’s database constructed using SBP’s Easydata platform”.