Gülbin Şahinbeyoğlu is appointed as TEPAV EIM’s Director.

Accurate and timely data is essential for interpreting the economy, setting policy responses and assessing the impacts of taken measures. Since the 2008-9 Global Financial Crisis, there has been wide debate on the adequacy of countries’ existing statistical frameworks. This debate has resulted in comprehensive international programs, which includes both the G20 Data Gap Initiative (DGI) and the Special Data Dissemination Standard Plus (SDDS+) geared towards improving the statistical infrastructure of IMF member countries. The main focal points surrounding these initiatives are depicting and understanding the connectivity between different sectors (including economic and financial linkages), accessing and evaluating micro data to complement macroeconomic statistics, filling in data gaps related to the real sector and households, and improving the effective dissemination of statistics.

All of the aforementioned is applicable for Turkey. Moreover, in contrast to conventional official statistics which lag in terms of timeliness and require alternative sources of information, the COVID-19 pandemic has made access to new forms of real time data even more vital in trying to understand the health of the economy on a day to day basis. New information technologies provide several AI tools and big data analytics in order to construct a new era for statistics, making it possible to analyze changes in economic activity as they occur.

In hopes of tackling this ongoing process, TEPAV is establishing the Economic Data Analysis Center (EIM) with Gülbin Şahinbeyoğlu as its Director. TEPAV’s newfound EIM aims to conduct sectoral and regional survey studies in order to monitor developments in different sectors of the Turkish economy and, by firstly addressing the real sector, establish a micro data infrastructure. EIM will publish leading and concurrent indicators of the economy, enabling us to understand the impact of the pandemic and policy responses. Existing statistical frameworks will be enriched by cooperating closely with public and private institutions to create and publish new types of indices and indicators.