World Cup 2026 in numbers: Key statistical goals, titles and age records
The 2026 World Cup has already set records for the most host nations, most matches and the highest prize money.
"STATISTICAL" · 총 18건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 87,192건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.3(균형)입니다. 긍정 4,386건(5.0%)·중립 80,758건(92.6%)·부정 2,048건(2.3%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 14.9(중도 균형)입니다.
The 2026 World Cup has already set records for the most host nations, most matches and the highest prize money.
There have been attempts to ‘misrepresent this normal exercise as data tampering, which is regrettable and factually inaccurate’, the official says; enumerators say they are being asked to edit data about open defecation and gas connection in particular
Главврач лечебно-реабилитационного научного центра «Феникс» Ольга Бухановская на XVIII съезде психиатров России заявила, что гомосексуальность относится к психическим заболеваниям, и рассказала об «эпидемии трансгендерности» в России, которую разжигали «финансовые вливания и гранты». Бухановская утверждает, что трансгендерные люди «проходят транс-инструктаж» у специальных кураторов, а затем имитируют «клинику транссексуализма». Заявления Бухановской о том, что гомосексуальность и трансгендерность являются психическим заболеванием, противоречат консенсусу западного психиатрического сообщества. Но и там этот консенсус был достигнут в результате десятилетий научных споров и исследований. Историк Рустам Александер рассказывает, как западное общество пришло к современному пониманию сексуальности. Иллюстрация: Rina Lu / «Новая Газета Европа». В США «депатологизация» гомосексуальности произошла в конце 1973 года. Это решение было далеко не одномоментным. После окончания Второй мировой войны американское общество было очень консервативным. Во многих штатах существовали законы, предусматривающие уголовное наказание за мужеложство, а гомосексуальность считалась психическим заболеванием. Многие люди скрывали свою ориентацию и вели двойную жизнь. Первым шагом к нормализации стало масштабное исследование сексуального поведения американцев, проведенное Альфредом Кинси. Оно называлось «Сексуальное поведение самца человека» и было опубликовано в 1948 году. Позднее, в 1953 году, Кинси опубликовал исследование о женской сексуальности. Исследования Кинси произвели эффект разорвавшейся бомбы: они шокировали общество и вызывали гнев, поскольку подвергали сомнению традиционные взгляды на сексуальность человека, которыми руководствовалось американское послевоенное общество. В частности, в работах Кинси говорилось, что гомосексуальное поведение было гораздо распространеннее в обществе, чем считалось раньше. Несмотря на открытия Кинси, гомосексуальность всё равно была включена в авторитетное Диагностические и статистическое руководство по психическим расстройствам Американской психиатрической ассоциации (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — DSM) как «сексуальное отклонение». Альфред Кинси. Фото: Alamy / Vida Press. Следующим масштабным исследованием стала работа «Адаптированность открыто гомосексуальных мужчин», опубликованная в 1957 году американским психологом и сексологом Эвелин Хукер. Сама Хукер поначалу тоже считала, что гомосексуальность — это болезнь. В 1944 году ей было 37 лет, и она преподавала в одном из университетов Лос-Анджелеса. Однажды после занятий к ней подошел студент по имени Сэм и признался, что он, как и большинство его друзей, гей. Сэм был одним из самых способных учеников в классе, и, несмотря на его ориентацию, они с преподавательницей быстро подружились. Однажды Сэм предложил своей учительнице начать изучать обычных гомосексуальных мужчин, чтобы наконец поставить точку в вопросе, является гомосексуальность психиатрическим отклонением или нет. Хукер вскоре согласилась. Сэм познакомил ее со своими друзьями-гомосексуалами, и так она постепенно собрала большой объем материала. „ Если гомосексуальность действительно являлась психиатрическим отклонением, рассуждала Хукер, то это должно было проявиться в психологических и психиатрических тестах. Эвелин Хукер. Фото: Wikimedia. Более того, психиатры должны были без труда отличать результаты тестов гомосексуальных мужчин от результатов гетеросексуальных. Однако когда она просила других врачей-специалистов, основываясь только на результатах тестирования и ничего не зная об ориентации испытуемых, выявить среди них гомосексуалов, никому не удавалось сделать правильно. Вывод напрашивался сам собой: степень социальной и психологической адаптированности гомосексуалов и гетеросексуалов практически не отличалась. Впоследствии другие исследования подтвердили находки Хукер. Конечно, были психиатры, которые пытались убедить своих коллег в том, что гомосексуальность — это болезнь. Среди них был психиатр Ирвинг Бибер, который в 1962 году опубликовал исследование «Гомосексуальность: психоаналитическое исследование мужчин-гомосексуалов». В нем он настаивал, что гомосексуальность является патологией личности. Сегодня теория Бибера считается необоснованной, поскольку он изучал только пациентов психиатрических клиник, у которых уже имелись определенные ментальные проблемы, а не обычных гомосексуалов, как это делала Эвелин Хукер. Однако в те годы многие восприняли его исследования всерьез. В 1960-х годах в США значительно укрепилось движение за права ЛГБТ. Переломным моментом стали беспорядки в баре «Стоунволл» в Нью-Йорке, после которых гей-активизм только усилился. Люди, выступавшие за права гомосексуалов, активно использовали исследования Кинси и Хукер, чтобы добиться исключения гомосексуальности из DSM Американской психиатрической ассоциации. Бар The Stonewall Inn, Нью-Йорк, США, 9 мая 2012 года. Фото: Andrew Gombert / EPA. Сначала активисты пытались установить диалог с Американской психиатрической ассоциацией — в первую очередь через протесты, призывая авторитетных врачей «начать говорить с ними». Им даже удалось организовать небольшой форум на съезде ассоциации в 1972 году под названием «Психиатрия – друг или враг гомосексуалов?». Организаторы съезда разрешили провести этот форум, посчитав, что лучше дать активистам небольшую площадку, чем терпеть их постоянные акции протеста. В программе форума был заявлен «Доктор Х. Аноним» — психиатр-гомосексуал, которого активисты уговорили выступить. Поскольку такое публичное выступление могло привести к увольнению доктора из университета, было решено сохранить его анонимность. „ На форуме Доктор Аноним появился в резиновой маске, парике и костюме на несколько размеров больше. Говорил он через устройство, искажающее голос. Свою речь он начал со слов: «Я — гомосексуал. Я психиатр». Затем он рассказал о множестве психиатров-гомосексуалов, которые состояли в Американской психиатрической ассоциации и были вынуждены скрывать свою ориентацию, ведя двойную жизнь. Хотя некоторые психиатры догадывались, кто скрывался за маской, лишь в 1994 году человек, выступавший под именем «Доктор Х. Аноним», публично назвал свое имя. Им оказался психиатр Джон Фрайер. Психиатр Джон Фрайер- Фото: Wikimedia. Выступление Фрайера стало переломным моментом. Многие психиатры никогда раньше не общались с гомосексуалами на равных и никогда по-настоящему к ним не прислушивались, считая их больными и социально дезадаптированными. А тут перед ними сидел гомосексуал, не пациент, а их собственный коллега — образованный и успешный психиатр. Хотя выступление анонима не привело к немедленному исключению гомосексуальности из списка психических расстройств, оно серьезно пошатнуло устоявшиеся стереотипы и заложило основу для дальнейших изменений. В декабре 1973 года Совет попечителей Американской психиатрической ассоциации проголосовал за исключение гомосексуальности из DSM. Многие психиатры были возмущены этим решением и потребовали провести голосование среди всех членов ассоциации. В 1974 году такое голосование состоялось: 5 854 психиатра поддержали исключение гомосексуальности, а 3 810 проголосовали против. Ассоциация сохранила в DSM диагноз «расстройство сексуальной ориентации», предназначенный для людей, испытывающих внутренний конфликт из-за своей сексуальной ориентации. Лишь в 1987 году все диагнозы, связанные с гомосексуальностью, были окончательно удалены из DSM. 17 мая 1990 года Всемирная организация здравоохранения (ВОЗ) исключила гомосексуальность из списка психических заболеваний. Россия официально признала эту точку зрения позже. В 1999 году Россия перешла на новую Международную классификацию болезней (МКБ-10), согласно которой сексуальная ориентация больше не считается расстройством личности. По сей день, несмотря на то, что государственная риторика представляет ЛГБТ как национальную угрозу, а психиатры, как Бухановская, открыто называют ее болезнью, с точки зрения официальной медицинской классификации гомосексуальность не входит в перечень психических заболеваний. Однако если официальный статус гомосексуальности в России пока еще соответствует международным медицинским стандартам, то в вопросах трансгендерности российская медицина пережила существенный откат назад: с июля 2023 года в стране запрещены операции по трансгендерному переходу, необходимые многим трансгендерным людям и предусмотренные международно признанными стандартами медицинской помощи.
June 4 - Peru's leftist presidential candidate Roberto Sanchez has gained ground against conservative Keiko Fujimori ahead of Sunday's presidential runoff, though both candidates remained in a statistical tie, an Ipsos poll showed on Thursday.
China has rejected a recent OECD report that said its firms receive far higher government subsidies than international peers, calling the findings “one-sided and arbitrary” at a time when EU concerns over Beijing’s industrial policy are intensifying. “The report’s definition of ‘subsidies’ lacks a unified standard and statistical framework, and deviates from consensus under multilateral frameworks such as the World Trade Organization,” the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on...
Dry weather is disrupting crop planting across Asia, raising concerns about food supplies in the world’s most populous region, and an expected severe El Niño weather pattern could inflict more damage. From India’s grain-producing northwestern plains to Australia’s eastern wheat belt, and from Thailand’s rice fields to Indonesia’s vast palm oil plantations, hot weather and below-normal rains are hurting crops and forcing farmers to reduce planting, farmers, analysts and traders said. El Niño-driven dryness is a double blow for farmers already grappling with fertiliser and diesel shortages caused by the Iran war. Wheat prices have risen about 20 per cent since the start of 2026, largely on concerns over drought in key US growing regions. Rice prices at major Southeast Asian export hubs have climbed around 15pc over the past month on rising production costs and fears of tighter supplies. One of the strongest El Niños on record is widely expected to develop in the second half of 2026, bringing hot-dry weather to Asia and excessive rains to the Americas, with global climate change making things worse. “The El Niño impact globally starts with Southeast Asia, India, Australia, before it has wider implications downstream in North America and South America,” said Chris Hyde, a US-based meteorologist at satellite data and imagery firm SkyFi. Hyde said early signs of drought are already visible on the company’s high-resolution imagery platform, across parts of Asia. Hot-dry weather hits farms In India, the meteorological department last week further reduced its forecast for the four-month monsoon season, which delivers about 70pc of annual rains. “With temperatures across most parts of the country remaining well above normal, conditions are currently unfavourable for the timely sowing of summer crops,” said one New Delhi-based dealer with a global trade house. “Planting is likely to be delayed due to the late onset of the monsoon, but greater concern lies in the possibility of below-normal rainfall and prolonged dry spells after its arrival.” India mainly grows rice, soybeans, pulses, sugarcane and corn in the summer season. For Southeast Asian countries, dryness is hitting rice and palm oil yields in some areas. “Everybody is worried (about drought), it’s risky,” said Nerawat Oramah, a 47-year-old farmer in central Thailand’s Chainat province. “For my second harvest, I have to wait and see the situation. It’s a risk for every one (if there is not enough water), there will only be one harvest.” Thailand and the Philippines plant their main rice crops in June-July, while Vietnam and Indonesia are now sowing their second-season crops. Indonesia’s most populated Java island and some areas in northern Sumatra, south Kalimantan and Sulawesi have not experienced any rain for more than 10 days, according to the country’s meteorological agency, with medium to low rainfall expected in June. Higher prices Rice prices are edging up even though India, which accounts for 40pc of global exports, is sitting on ample supplies after years of near-record harvests. “There is clear indication of crisis as rice prices have moved substantially higher without any major shortage,” said one Singapore-based trader at an international trading company, adding Thai rice prices have climbed around 15pc in the past month. “India has a huge rice stockpile, several times more than what it needs. But the thinking is that very soon India will start looking at these stocks as a critical asset and may introduce some sort of export curbs if we see problems with early part of the monsoon.” However, KKP Research, a unit of Kiatnakin Phatra Bank in Thailand, said some of the impact of the dryness could be cushioned by strong reservoir levels. “What we are more concerned about is fertiliser supply,” the bank said in a note to Reuters. “We estimate that a fertiliser shortage, if it occurs, could reduce rice production by up to 15-20pc in the worst case.” Recent rains over parched Australian farmland have triggered late wheat sowing, but growers are wary of the El Niño in the coming months that could hit yields. The Bureau of Meteorology is predicting that many cropping areas across New South Wales and Queensland will see between 20 and 40 millimetres less rain than usual over the next three months. John Lowe, a farmer near Burcher in central New South Wales, said his total cropping area is still around 30pc smaller than it could have been. El Niño is likely to be neutral for China and the Black Sea region, while bringing more rains to the Americas. “Statistically speaking, there is not much correlation with weather in the US and El Niño, during the summer,” said Drew Lerner, an agricultural meteorologist and president of World Weather Inc. “In a lot of years, we can come up with a little bit more moisture in an El Niño summer. But that does not really mean above-normal rainfall.”
Statistical Notices update the definitions and guidance contained in the Banking Statistics Yellow Folder
Country: Democratic Republic of the Congo Source: ELRHA Author Jennifer O’Keeffe, Augustin Gang Karume and Paul Spiegel This blog series accompanies the Mortality Estimation Systems Innovation Partnership (SIP), supported by UKHIH-Elrha, which brings together diverse partners to strengthen how mortality data is collected, interpreted, and used across humanitarian crises. Earlier blogs in this series highlighted why excess mortality measurement is critical for understanding crisis severity, as well as exploring how to maximise local and national actors' leadership in the mortality estimation ecosystem. In this third blog, we turn to Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Rebuild Hope for Africa and the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health share how their work is making mortality estimation more accurate, accessible, and feasible for national actors best placed to do this work, even in the most challenging settings. “As an indicator, a mortality rate tries to evaluate the size and scale of a crisis in a single metric.” The Public Health Aspects of Complex Emergencies and Refugee Situations, 1997, Michael Toole, Ronald Waldman In 2023, the Humanitarian Congress in Vienna released a statement saying, "The humanitarian imperative is an absolute moral obligation to save lives and alleviate human suffering on the basis of need, without discrimination”. Yet**,** when resources are constrained, allocation is often based on geopolitical interests, media coverage, or how relatable a population may be to high-income donor countries. In short, human lives are valued differentially. The disconnect is not theoretical. In 2022, Rebuild Hope for Africa (RHA) led a nationwide mortality survey in the Central African Republic which estimated up to 5% of the population had died during the previous year. Despite the scale of these findings, the study received little media attention and did not lead to meaningful changes in donor policy. In conflict-affected settings, various, often compounding, factors make primary data collection difficult or impossible. These include forced displacement, insecurity, system failures, poor infrastructure, limited capacity, and restricted access. In practice, mortality is often not measured at all. And as threats to healthcare workers grow, international agencies have become understandably risk averse, collecting data only safer, accessible areas, where death rates are usually lowest. Without reliable data, decision makers and responders depend on fragmented sources and non-robust estimates. The result is a biased and misleading picture of crisis severity, that often portrays crises as less severe than they are. The magnitude of these biases and their effects on decisions by humanitarian actors, governments, and donors who rely on such data, remain largely unexamined. Our partnership between Rebuild Hope for Africa (RHA) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health (CHH) is working to change this. Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo - An Unquantified Crisis Few places demonstrate the challenges of mortality estimation more than the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), one of the world’s most enduring humanitarian crises. The crisis worsened drastically in January 2025 when the country suffered a devastating double shock: the abrupt withdrawal of USAID funding and a violent military offensive by the Rwandan-backed rebel group M23. The M23 seized large swathes of territory, killing and displacing an unknown number of people in the process. With the departure of many international agencies and a vacuum in humanitarian response, the population has been left vulnerable to the worst effects of the conflict. A year later, the true human cost remains unknown. We recognise that without reliable data, it becomes even harder to mobilise the support that people living in Eastern DRC urgently need. Placing Data and Decision-Making in Congolese hands Augustin Gang Karume, one of the authors of this blog, was born and raised in Eastern DRC, where he still lives and works today. In 2008, he founded RHA to place data and decision-making back in Congolese hands. He understood then that national actors are the future of sustainable humanitarian response. Rooted in the community and living with the long-term consequences of decision-making, national actors have a strong incentive to prioritise community needs over institutional agendas. Using local networks and knowledge, they are the best equipped to conduct primary data collection in insecure settings. While international actors have scaled back amid funding austerity, national organisations like RHA have remained in place, continuing to work for and within their communities. These actors are also proving to be far more cost-effective and efficient. Without international overhead, they can often deliver results at a fraction of the cost of international organisations. As an example, RHA’s 2022 nationwide mortality survey in the Central African Republic, cost a total of 50,000 USD, whereas a single district SMART survey may cost upwards of 15,000 USD*. National actors are the first responders in nearly all crises and remain present long after international attention and funding fade. Bridging Local Leadership with Technical Expertise With funding from the UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub’s Systems Innovation Partnership, we are bridging RHA’s local leadership with technical expertise from the CHH, combining community trust with advanced epidemiological and statistical training. Together RHA and CHH are collaborating on a study to assess potential biases in mortality estimation through both primary data collection and innovative use of statistical approaches. We’re working to make mortality estimation more accurate, credible, and efficient, with the intent to apply the findings across humanitarian settings. In the primary data collection component, our study is comparing three different methods of mortality estimation: a retrospective household survey, rapid key informant listing, and a full census. Using a common reference population and recall period, the study aims to identify where biases arise, quantify which deaths are missed, and assess relative performance of a light-, medium- and resource-intensive approach to mortality measurement. In the statistical component, we are applying innovative use of established causal and design-based methods to assess biases. We are testing the utility and feasibility of these methods to answer questions like: to what extent are hard to capture deaths, such as neonatal and violent deaths, systematically missed; can fewer survey clusters still provide estimates precise enough for decision making; and can analytical adjustments be used to address known biases? We are also supporting localisation by building field-ready guidance tools designed to make mortality estimation more accessible to operational actors. These tools include an algorithm to help teams choose a method, an operational readiness checklist, and a guide to data validation, triangulation, interpretation. Our aim is to make mortality estimation practicable in even the most challenging settings, without compromising quality. As the best-placed actors to assess mortality, we hope to pilot the guidance with national actors in the DRC and elsewhere to ensure it is user-friendly, actionable, and scalable for use in any crisis. Looking Ahead: Making Mortality Count Without credible mortality data, humanitarian response risks being inefficient, inequitable, and disconnected from reality. We cannot respond appropriately to crises we do not understand. When those with the greatest capacity to measure mortality have the least stake in the results, the system fails. The best way to ensure efficiency and effectiveness is to place local organisations at the centre. Connecting local expertise with technical knowledge offers a path toward a fairer humanitarian sector, where the reality of a crisis is described by those living through it. *2017 estimate adjusted for inflation.
MAY 29 — For decades, Malaysia has been trapped in a cruel statistical paradox. We pump billions into research cen...
India is undertaking the revision of Index of Industrial Production (IIP) and plans to release the new series on June 1, 2026, marking the tenth revision of base year. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) has broadened the scope of the index to include 120 new item groups and enhance the granularity by providing separate indices for numerous sectors.The base year of IIP is being shifted to 2022-23 from 2011-12. The new IIP will track several new items such as magnetic stripe cards including debit and credit cards, CCTV cameras, non-woven textile products, aircraft and spacecraft parts, stents, and vaccines.The revised series significantly widens the scope of industrial activity captured in the index by adding emerging and previously underrepresented sectors such as rare earth minerals, gas supply, water management and waste treatment.MoSPI has also overhauled the product basket to better reflect contemporary industrial production patterns, replacing obsolete items with newer commodities and aligning the series with the updated National Industrial Classification (NIC)-2025 framework. The revised basket now comprises 1,042 products mapped to 463 item groups, including 120 new item groups. MoSPI has dropped 64 item groups from the list, which include kerosene, fluorescent tubes and CFLs, tubes for bicycle, tricycle and rickshaw tyres.The new series introduces more granular sub-indices, including separate tracking of renewable and non-renewable electricity generation, allowing policymakers to better monitor India’s evolving energy mix. The mining and quarrying segment has also been split into dedicated indices for fuel minerals, metallic minerals and non-metallic minerals.The revised methodology also allows statistical authorities to replace permanently shut factories with comparable operating units and induct newly commissioned large factories into the sample base during the life of the series. This is expected to improve the representativeness and timeliness of industrial output data.MoSPI will use a geometric mean-based approach to transition from the 2011-12 base series to the new 2022-23 series.Why is the base year being revised?According to a government release, the IIP base year is revised to reflect structural changes in the economy, technological progress, and the growth of new industries and products. “Revising the base year ensures that the index accurately represents current production patterns and provides more reliable data for economic analysis and policy-making,” MoSPI said.A Report of the Technical Advisory Committee for ‘New Series of All India Index ofIndustrial Production 2022-23’ highlighted the need for periodic revision which arises from the dynamic nature of the economy.“The structure of production, the relative importance of industries, and the range of products manufactured undergo continuous change over time,” it said, adding that regular revisions of the base years of economic indicators like IIP are therefore essential to ensure that they remain representative of current industrial activity.The index must continue to accurately reflect evolving economic realities.Citing “significant” advancements in statistical methodologies and computational capabilities over the period, MoSPI report said that the processes that were difficult to execute have now become relatively easier to implement.The new IIP series retains the existing sectors of Mining, Manufacturing, and Electricity. However, it expands the scope by including Gas Supply and Water Supply, Sewerage & Waste Management activities, giving a broader and more accurate picture of industrial production. In the Mining sector, the new IIP series also includes minor minerals and rare earth minerals along with major minerals, making the index more comprehensive.131367884The item basket for sectors, other than Manufacturing, is selected based on the nature of activities and key measurable outputs of each sector. MoSPI, in certain cases, has held consultation with concerned ministries and departments.The new item baskets are as follows:The ‘Mining & Quarrying’ basket includes 34 minerals comprising fuel minerals and metallic & non-metallic minerals regulated, along with 1 rare earth mineral and 9 minor minerals.The ‘Electricity’ basket covers total electricity generation from both renewable and non-renewable sources.The ‘Gas Supply’ basket uses the volume of gas supplied or distributed through mains/pipelines as the item of measurement.Under the ‘Water Supply, Sewerage & Waste Management’, the government tracks water supply through tap connections, sewerage through sewerage/septage connections and waste management through the quantity of waste collected and processed.MoSPI has formed the item groups for IIP by aggregating products based on similarity within the industry group to ensure consistency, comparability, and operational feasibility in monthly data reporting.The government has also kept the revision of substitution of the factories in the new series of IIP to address the challenges of prolonged non-response or closed factory.While the six use-based categories—Primary Goods, Capital Goods, Intermediate goods, Infrastructure/ Construction Goods, Consumer Durable Goods and Consumer Non-Durable Goods—remain the same as the 2011–12 series, individual item classifications have been reviewed in detail and updated.Why is IIP important?The report recognised that the index is “not just a technical statistical indicator, but an important measure” that stakeholders understand the health and direction of the economy.The IIP provides one of the earliest signals of industrial performance, and hence plays a crucial role in economic planning, policymaking, and market analysis.The index plays a pivotal role in tracking cyclical conditions, informing fiscal and monetary policy deliberations, and shaping expectations of businesses and investors, helped by macro and sectoral analysts.MoSPI believes in the idea that economic statistics must keep pace with the economic transformations, and hence new products, emerging technologies, evolving production systems, and changing patterns of industrial activity are being included in the index calculation.“Industrial statistics cannot remain fixed while industries themselves are rapidly changing,” it said in the report cited above.
[Economy] : The number of young people in their late 20s who took a break without looking for a job has increased by more than 30-thousand, the largest number in six years. According to data by the Korean Statistical Information Service(KOSIS) on Thursday, the number of economically inactive people aged between 25 ... [more...]
South Korea saw the sharpest April increase since 2020 in the number of people in their late 20s who were neither working nor looking for work, even as the country’s population in that age group continued to shrink, government data showed Thursday. The economically inactive population aged 25 to 29 reached 784,000 in April, up 37,000 from the same month in 2025, according to the Korean Statistical Information Service. The last time Korea saw such a steep rise in economically inactive people in t
Statistical Notices update the definitions and guidance contained in the Banking Statistics Yellow Folder
The animals arrive before the city wakes. By three in the morning, a few weeks before Eidul Azha, the livestock markets on the periphery of Karachi are already dense with noise and colour, the restless lowing of cattle from Sindh’s interior, the sharper bleating of goats driven down from Balochistan, the occasional camel standing in imperious silence while traders haggle beneath fluorescent lights. The men who have brought these animals have been travelling for days. They have fed these animals, watered them, negotiated their passage across provincial checkpoints and absorbed the cost of fodder — the price of which has only increased in the past three years — and the ever-increasing cost of transportation, courtesy a sovereign that refuses to be fiscally responsible. They are supply-side participants in one of Pakistan’s largest annual markets. But no official body counts them with any precision. Every Eidul Azha, millions of Pakistanis participate in a decentralised economic event larger than half the federal development budget. In just three days, half a trillion rupees flow through the country’s economy and half a million tonnes of protein are distributed. From livestock traders and butchers to rural farmers, transporters and tannery workers, this is the story of the vast informal economy that sustains this nation and that the state barely measures UNDERSTANDING EID CASH FLOWS Pakistan slaughters approximately 7.4 million animals over the three days of Eidul Azha. Cattle, buffalo, goats, sheep, camels, in that order of economic weight. The best available national estimate for 2025, triangulated from the Pakistan Tanners Association’s (PTA) hide counts, municipal offal disposal data from seven cities, and State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) monetary flow data, puts the total national spending on Eidul Azha sacrificial animals and ancillary activities at approximately Rs641 billion in the base case, with a defensible range of Rs539-752 billion, depending on price realisation and incidentals. Even at the lower bound, this is more than half a trillion rupees, moving through the economy in 72 hours. To put that in context: Pakistan’s annual federal Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) allocation — the government’s entire development spending budget — was Rs1.1 trillion in FY2025. Private spending on Eidul Azha is equivalent to roughly 60 percent of the state’s annual development budget, generated not through tax collection or donor funding or institutional planning, but through the decentralised decisions of millions of households observing a religious obligation. No ministry coordinates it. No central bank directs it. It simply happens, every year, with a precision of timing that formal planners can only envy. Eidul Azha moves half-a-million tonnes of protein to tables across the country, transfers hundreds of billions of rupees from cities to villages, sustains an entire industrial raw material supply chain, and provides the peak income event of the year for millions of workers who are never counted in employment surveys. It does all of this without a single government directive, subsidy or implementation report. Broad money (which refers to all cash and coins in circulation, as well as all local currency bank deposits) data, as reported by the State Bank of Pakistan, corroborates the scale independently. In the weeks before Eid 2025, ‘Currency in Circulation’ (CIC), the stock of physical cash held outside the banking system, rose by Rs619 billion from its pre-Eid baseline. Strip out the normal seasonal drift in cash demand, and the abnormal cash pulse attributable to Eid-related spending was approximately Rs369 billion. Apply the standard transaction-equivalent multiplier, accounting for the fact that each rupee of cash is used multiple times before it returns to the banking system, and a macro cash-cycle estimate for Eid spending lands at Rs609 billion. This is strikingly close to the Rs641 billion from the physical animal model, and the convergence of two independent methods built on entirely different data sources is the strongest possible signal that the estimate is in the right order of magnitude. The cash tells its own story, as animals are bought and sold primarily in cash. Thereby, a spike in ‘Currency in Circulation’ is as reliable a fingerprint of economic activity as anything in the formal data. Livestock markets, like the one pictured above, are one link in the chain that leads to Pakistan’s enormous Eidul Azha cash flows | White Star SOURCING THE NUMBERS The methodological challenge of estimating Eidul Azha spending is instructive because it illuminates a broader truth about Pakistan’s economy — the most important things happening in it are the hardest to measure. There is no national qurbani [animal sacrifice] census, and the last livestock census was done more than a decade ago. To understand the nature of such a cash-rich economy, we try to triangulate the size of spending through multiple sources of data. The first is the PTA, which counts hides and skins collected after Eid by the leather industry. Every sacrificed animal produces one hide or skin. The PTA’s 2025 figure, more than 7.4 million hides and skins, is therefore the closest available national headcount of sacrificed animals. Its weaknesses include hide spoilage, informal collection channels and cross-border leakage, suggesting that the true count is higher than what reaches the tanneries. But it provides a lower-bound anchor that is more reliable than any survey. The second is municipal offal data. Every major city’s solid waste management authority publishes post-Eid operational reports, detailing how many tonnes of animal waste, offal, entrails, hides and carcass remains are collected and disposed of. These figures are physically tied to slaughter activity, as one cannot manufacture false offal. Karachi’s Solid Waste Management Board collected and disposed of 76,000 tonnes of offal and animal waste over three days of Eid 2025. The Lahore Waste Management Company disposed of 54,888 tonnes across the city in the same period. Punjab province as a whole removed over 230,000 tonnes of animal waste in three days. The third is the SBP’s weekly monetary data, the ‘Currency in Circulation’ series that is embedded in the Broad Money (M2) dataset. The pre-Eid cash spike, once isolated from normal seasonal variation, is a macro-scale fingerprint of economic activity that no amount of underreporting or informal transacting can entirely obscure. Turkey’s central bank documented an identical phenomenon for its own Eidul Azha celebration, wherein the cash pulse is a universal feature of Islamic festival economies where livestock is purchased for cash. All three methods largely converge on Rs600-650 billion. The conclusion is not that any individual method is perfect, but that the underlying economic reality is large enough to show up clearly through three different lenses, each with its own blind spots. THE CHAIN Consider the supply chain of a single cow. It was likely bred and raised in rural Punjab or Sindh or Balochistan. The farmer who owns it fed it for months on fodder purchased from local traders, and may have taken a short-term loan, informally, from a commission agent or a moneylender, to finance the feed cost in the weeks (or even months) before Eid. The animal was then sold, either directly at a roadside mandi [marketplace] or through a chain of two to three intermediary traders, each extracting a margin. Transport was hired, a truck, or a three-wheeled vehicle for smaller animals, adding income to the logistics sector. In the city, the animal was held at a temporary mandi where stall fees were paid, and where fodder sellers and water vendors extracted their share. After purchase, a butcher was hired to perform the slaughter and cut the meat. This is, for thousands of professional butchers across urban Pakistan, the single-most economically productive week of their year. The hide went to a collector, who sold it to the tannery supply chain. Every link in that chain becomes a rural-to-urban or informal-to-formal income event. The directional flow of this money matters enormously. As Pakistan’s GDP growth model has long been driven by urban consumption and remittance-backed demand, agricultural incomes, which support roughly 40 percent of the population, are chronically undercounted and structurally under-stimulated by government policy. AN URBAN-TO-RURAL TRANSFER Eidul Azha is one of the few moments when a large, clean, unconditional income transfer from urban-to-rural Pakistan occurs at scale, driven entirely by private religious obligation rather than government subsidy or development programmes. An average cattle animal in 2025 sold for approximately Rs110,000 at mass-market rates — not the premium animals that appear in viral social media videos, but the median cow that the majority of urban households buy, often collectively, through a seven-shares arrangement. Of that price, the livestock farmer retains somewhere between 55 and 65 percent, after paying trader margins and transport — a rough estimate, given the opacity of the mandi system, but consistent with value-chain analyses of Pakistan’s livestock sector. On seven million animals averaging Rs60,000 to the farmer, that is Rs420 billion flowing into rural and peri-urban household incomes over a single week. The equivalent of a medium-sized development programme, except it happens every year without fail. Karachi alone is estimated to have spent Rs185 billion on Eidul Azha in 2025, approximately 29 percent of the national total, from a city that accounts for roughly 15 percent of the national population. The offal data is the anchor here, as the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board (SSWMB), Karachi’s municipal solid waste authority, collected 76,000 tonnes of offal and animal waste over three Eid days. Working back from species-weighted offal yield per animal, this implies approximately 2.2 million sacrificed animals within the city’s collection perimeter, estimated to be around 945,000 cattle, 1.1 million goats, 110,000 sheep, and roughly 6,600 camels. The cattle count is what makes Karachi distinctive. Its species mix — approximately 43 percent cattle, 50 percent goats, reflects a city in which the seven-shares cow arrangement has become the dominant mode of participation for middle-income households. Seven shares means seven households pooling their resources to sacrifice one cow. It is the mechanism through which Eidul Azha democratises participation, reducing the per-household entry price. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have formalised this arrangement, publishing per-share and per-animal prices annually and providing a mass-market price anchor that is often more representative of actual transaction prices than mandi headlines. PROTEIN TO THE PEOPLE Seven million animals yield meat. Specifically, they yield approximately 532,000 tonnes of edible meat, a figure derived from species-weighted meat-yield assumptions across the 2025 national headcount. At the conservative base-case spending of Rs641 billion, this implies an effective price of Rs1,203 per kilogramme of edible meat produced through the qurbani system. That cost-per-kilogramme figure tells a story that neither the religious nor the economic framing of Eidul Azha typically acknowledges. Half a million tonnes of meat are distributed in three days, largely through a system of voluntary redistribution mandated by Islamic practice, one-third retained by the household, one-third to relatives and neighbours, one-third to the poor. The state spends tens of billions annually on food subsidy and social protection programmes that distribute far less protein to far fewer people, with far greater administrative friction. The targeting of this meat distribution is imperfect, it follows social networks rather than poverty maps, and urban poor with weak social ties may receive less than rural communities with dense kinship networks. But the scale of redistribution is real, and it is achieved without a single government form, helpline or district officer. Eid-ul-Azha is Pakistan’s largest annual food redistribution event, and it is run entirely by private citizens acting on religious conviction. THE HEALTH OF THE ECONOMY There is a development economics argument waiting to be made here about the undervalued social infrastructure embedded in religious practice, the way that institutions such as zakat, qurbani and sadqa [voluntary charity] operate as informal insurance mechanisms for communities that formal social protection has not reached. Among the most elegant pieces of evidence in this analysis is what the State Bank’s weekly monetary data reveals about Pakistan’s cash economy. In the two weeks before Eidul Azha 2025 in early June, ‘Currency in Circulation’ rose from Rs10,296 billion to a peak of Rs10,915 billion, a gross run-up of Rs619 billion. After Eid, cash began returning to the banking system — by late June, Rs280 billion had returned. The return ratio, the fraction of withdrawn cash that returns to the banking system within four weeks, was approximately 45 percent in 2025. The remainder does not disappear, it circulates in the informal economy, paying for goods and services that never touch a bank account. This is the texture of Pakistan’s cash economy, a monetary stock moving through channels that formal financial infrastructure barely glimpses. Eidul Azha, for three days, lights it up. The 2024 cycle was even more pronounced, an abnormal cash pulse of Rs475 billion producing a macro spending estimate of Rs783 billion, the highest in the four-year series. The 2023 figure, by contrast, was subdued at Rs225 billion, consistent with an economically stressed Eid, in which animal volumes contracted and households downgraded their sacrifice choices. The cash cycle does not lie about the direction of economic confidence. Its variation across years tracks living standards in ways that headline GDP growth rates obscure. THE INVISIBLE ECONOMY Behind every tonne of offal in an SSWMB logistics report is a person. Somewhere in the Malir or Bin Qasim area, Mohammad Akram may have just completed his busiest three days of the year as a butcher. He earns, by conservative estimates, Rs1,500-2,500 per animal for the slaughter and cutting service and, on each of the three Eid days, he and his apprentices may process eight to 12 animals. In a normal month, he earns Rs25,000-35,000 as a neighbourhood halal meat cutter. In these three days, he earns more than he does in six weeks. He does not appear in any formal employment survey. His income is not taxed, not tracked and not counted in any quarterly economic indicator. In Rahim Yar Khan, Ghulam Abbas, a livestock trader, has been buying and selling cattle for three months in preparation for this week. He purchased animals from smallholder farmers in the canal colonies at Rs75,000-90,000 and sold them in Karachi and Lahore mandis at Rs110,000-130,000. His margin, after mandi fees, fodder en route, and the inevitable animals that lost condition during transport, was perhaps 15-20 percent per successful animal. He operates entirely in cash. He has no Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC)-registered business, no national tax number (NTN), and neither a bank account into which he routinely deposits income. He is, statistically, invisible, since all of the above is not counted in any quarterly economic indicator. And in a village in Muzaffargarh, a farmer who has been feeding a buffalo for six months, spending regularly on fodder, finally sells the animal, for potentially his largest single cash transaction of his year. It pays off the informal credit he was extended from his local commission agent to finance the feed. It puts money into his wife’s hands for household expenditure they have deferred since winter. It buys school supplies for September and repairs a roof that has leaked since the last monsoon. This one transaction moving from an urban Karachi household to a rural Muzaffargarh smallholder is what an economist would call a wealth transfer, and what a sociologist might call a solidarity mechanism, but it is just really a religious festival. The absence of a national qurbani census is not merely an accounting inconvenience. It reflects a structural incapacity in Pakistan’s statistical machinery to measure its own informal economy and, by extension, to understand where welfare actually comes from and how it flows. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ national accounts methodology relies on formal sector production, tax-registered enterprises and periodic household surveys. None of these instruments are designed to capture a Rs641 billion informal market event that is over in three days and leaves no paper trail beyond a municipal waste disposal report. This is consequential for policy. If the state does not know that rural livestock farmers receive an annual Rs400-plus billion income boost from Eidul Azha demand, it cannot model what happens to agricultural household incomes when urban purchasing power declines. If it does not know that 532,000 tonnes of protein are redistributed privately in three days, it cannot calibrate its own food security interventions against that baseline. If it does not know that Rs609 billion of cash circulates through informal channels over Eid week, it cannot design monetary policy or financial inclusion programmes that speak to where cash actually goes. Sacrificial animals at a cattle market on Peshawar’s Ring Road: Eidul Azha is one of the few moments when a large, clean, unconditional income transfer from urban-to-rural Pakistan occurs at scale | White Star COUNTING WHAT ALREADY EXISTS There are tractable improvements available. The PTA already produces an annual hide count. The state should formalise this into an official livestock sacrifice census with provincial disaggregation. Municipal waste management authorities already produce offal tonnage reports. A standardised template, mandated by the Ministry of National Food Security, could convert these operational records into a usable annual economic dataset. The State Bank already publishes weekly CIC data. A dedicated Eidul Azha monetary analysis, published annually, would give policymakers a macro cash-cycle baseline, against which to track informal sector health. None of these reforms require new institutions, new laws or new money, but only the administrative will to count what already exists. There is a version of this article that ends with a set of policy prescriptions, which call to formalise livestock markets, expand banking access for traders, rationalise hide collection and integrate qurbani data into national accounts. That version is not wrong, but it misses a more fundamental observation that Pakistan’s formal economy, the one that shows up in fiscal accounts, monetary reports, and GDP growth announcements, is smaller and weaker than the economy people actually live in. The state taxes perhaps 12 percent of the GDP. The formal banking sector serves perhaps a third of the adult population, not counting laughably restricted wallets masquerading as accounts. Formal employment, by most estimates, covers fewer than 15 percent of workers. Everything else, the livestock trader, the itinerant butcher, the hide collector, the mandi fodder seller, operates in a parallel economy that is not broken or failed. It is functional, adaptive and deeply connected to the social and religious institutions that give Pakistani life its rhythms. Eidul Azha spends Rs641 billion in 72 hours, moves half-a-million tonnes of protein to tables across the country, transfers hundreds of billions of rupees from cities to villages, sustains an entire industrial raw material supply chain, and provides the peak income event of the year for millions of workers who are never counted in employment surveys. It does all of this without a single government directive, subsidy or implementation report. It is, in the most literal sense, the people’s economy, running on faith, obligation and the irreplaceable social technology of a 14 century-old institution. The animal arrives before the city wakes. The trader has been on the road for days. The butcher sharpens his knife. The tannery lights up its furnaces. And somewhere in Muzaffargarh, a farmer holds cash in his hand for the first time in months and thinks about the roof. The state should learn to see all of this. It has been happening, at scale, for as long as there have been cities in this country — the numbers exist, someone just has to count them. The writer is a macroeconomist and professor of practice at IBA, Karachi. He can be reached at ammar.habib@gmail.com Published in Dawn, EOS, May 24th, 2026
Runway incursions are making flying look too close for comfort these days, reports Bruce Golding, even if flying is still statistically the safest mode of travel as Memorial Day weekend approaches
Statistical Notices update the definitions and guidance contained in the Banking Statistics Yellow Folder
Statistical Notices update the definitions and guidance contained in the Banking Statistics Yellow Folder
Green notices cover significant and/or significant proposals for Bank of England reporting. If any of these proposals are finalised and are to be implemented, they will appear in a statistical notice.