Search for a "Pakistan economic data API" and you'll get a long list: the State Bank's EasyData portal, PBS, the World Bank, the IMF, ADB, UN Comtrade, Trading Economics, CEIC and more. They're all real sources, but they do different jobs. Here's the whole landscape, and why PakDataHub is the one to start with if Pakistan is what you're building on.
First, the question of authority
For research or finance, the source of truth is the publisher: the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), the PTA or MUFAP. PakDataHub doesn't replace them. It serves their numbers unchanged. Every series links to its exact official source (source_url) and keeps revision history. So choosing PakDataHub still means using SBP and PBS as the source of truth, just through one clean API. (How we source and validate.)
The options
Official Pakistani sources
- SBP EasyData: the SBP's open-data portal. Authoritative, broad within the SBP, with an API that needs sign-in and has per-key quotas and expiring keys. Series use codes like
TS_GP_ER_FAERPKR_M.E00220, units are often unstated, and it doesn't carry PBS, PTA or MUFAP data. PakDataHub ingests all of it. Full comparison. - SBP economic data pages and publications: official, but spread across web pages, PDFs and Excel.
- PBS (including NSDP): official CPI, SPI, LSM, trade and national accounts, mostly as PDF and Excel releases.
- MUFAP and PTA: fund and telecom statistics as web tables and reports.
Global and regional aggregators
- World Bank API: free, keyless and cross-country, but mostly annual headline indicators for Pakistan. What it covers and what it doesn't.
- IMF, ADB, UN Data, OECD: harmonized macro series, good for comparison, but thin on Pakistan-specific monthly and daily detail.
- Trading Economics, CEIC, Knoema: broad commercial platforms, often sales-gated and priced for institutions, and Pakistan is one country among 200.
- UN Comtrade, ITC, FAOSTAT, ILOSTAT, UNCTADstat, Penn World Table: excellent single-domain datasets (trade by HS code, agriculture, labour, FDI, long-run productivity) that complement a Pakistan economic API.
PakDataHub
One REST API for Pakistan's official economic and financial data:
- 16,964 series from 1947 to today: exchange rates, inflation (including by group, plus essential-goods prices by city), KIBOR since 2005, the policy rate, the PKRV yield curve, auction cut-offs, reserves since 1948, remittances by country, the balance of payments, money and banking, GDP, LSM, autos, power, public finance, debt, population and social indicators, and Raast and digital payments.
- Entity data: 567 mutual funds with NAVs since 1996 and computed analytics, debt securities, weekly prices of 30 essentials in 17 cities.
- Developer features: readable stable ids, labelled units, JSON or CSV, server-side transforms (YoY, MoM, index), revision vintages and webhooks.
- Self-serve: public pricing, and a free tier that reaches every dataset. You get a key in minutes.
Quick comparison
| Official portals | World Bank / IMF | Commercial aggregators | PakDataHub | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Official figures | ✓ | Harmonized | Re-published | ✓ (unchanged, source-linked) |
| Pakistan depth (daily, weekly, monthly detail) | ✓, per institution | Low | Medium | ✓ all institutions |
| One API for everything | - | ✓ (global) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Readable ids, labelled units | - | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transforms, vintages, webhooks | - | - | Some | ✓ |
| Self-serve and free to start | Partly | ✓ | Rarely | ✓ |
Get started in one call
curl -H "X-API-Key: pk_live_xxx" \
"https://api.pakdatahub.com/v1/series/inflation.cpi.national.yoy?from=2020-01-01&sort=asc"
Browse the data dictionary, read the API reference, or get a free key.
(For Pakistan Stock Exchange equities, which PakDataHub deliberately doesn't cover, pypsx.com is the developer-first option. Use pypsx.com for stocks and PakDataHub for the economy around them.)