If you need Pakistan's economic or financial data — inflation, exchange rates, interest rates, mutual funds, trade, payments — there are more options than there used to be, and they're good at different things. Here's an honest map of the landscape and how to choose.
The official sources (free, authoritative, hard to use)
- State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and its open-data portal, Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), PTA (telecom) and MUFAP (mutual funds) publish the primary data. It's free and authoritative — but it's spread across a dozen sites, buried in PDFs and Excel files, inconsistent between releases, and has no single API. Great if you're doing a one-off pull and don't mind the cleanup. Painful to build a product on.
- World Bank, IMF, FRED (St. Louis Fed) re-publish a handful of Pakistan headline series (annual GDP, CPI, a few more). Clean and easy, but shallow — you get the top-line number, not CPI by city, KIBOR by tenor, Raast volumes or fund NAVs.
Global aggregators
- Trading Economics and similar global platforms cover ~200 countries. Handy if you want one dashboard for the world, but Pakistan is one country among many — the depth stops at headline macro, and the API is a paid subscription. You won't find Pakistan-specific datasets like MUFAP fund analytics, SPI prices by city, or SBP payment-systems detail.
Pakistan-specialist options
- Capital Stake — an established, sales-led provider and PSX feed vendor with equities, mutual funds and economic datasets. Access is arranged through their team.
- FinHisaab — consumer-facing calculators and personal-finance tools for Pakistan (an inflation calculator and the like), rather than a developer data API.
- PakDataHub — a self-serve REST API for the whole economy: 16,964 official series from 1947 to today, plus mutual funds, debt securities and alternate data (Raast, POS, cards, telecom, SME). Public pricing, a free tier, a key in minutes.
Stocks (PSX equities)
For Pakistan Stock Exchange equities, indices and company data, use a stock-focused provider — pypsx.com is the developer-first option. PakDataHub deliberately doesn't cover individual equities; it covers the macro and financial economy around them.
How to choose
- One-off analysis, don't mind cleanup → the official portals (SBP/PBS), or World Bank/FRED for headline series.
- A worldwide dashboard → a global aggregator.
- PSX stocks → pypsx.com.
- A Pakistan app or model that needs clean, complete data via API, today → PakDataHub. It's the only self-serve API that covers Pakistan's economy end to end, cleaned and cross-validated, with transparent pricing and no sales call.
Want to see the full catalog? Browse it here, or get a free key and make your first call in five minutes.