The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is an organization of South Asian nations, which was established on 8 December 1985 when the government of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka formally adopted its charter providing for the promotion of economic and social progress, cultural development within the South Asia region and also for friendship and cooperation with other developing countries. Subsequently, Afghanistan became a full member of SAARC in 2007. SAARC Secretariat was established in Kathmandu on 16 January 1987.

The objectives of the SAARC include, inter alia, promoting the welfare of the peoples of South Asia by accelerating growth and social progress; promoting collective self reliance within the region; to promote active collaboration and mutual assistance in the economic, social, cultural, technical and scientific fields; and strengthening cooperation among themselves in international for a and cooperating with international and regional organisations with similar aims and objectives.

SAARCFINANCE is the network of Central Bank Governors and Finance Secretaries of the SAARC region. It was established in 1998 in Colombo in 10th SAARC Summit of the Head of the States of the SAARC Region. The SAARCFINANCE central bank governors meet twice every year to discuss areas of mutual cooperation.

The important objectives of SAARCFINANCE network are to enhance cooperation among member central banks and finance ministries by sharing experiences on macroeconomic policy issues, propose harmonization of banking legislations and practices within the region, and forge closer cooperation on macroeconomic policies of SAARC member states and to enhance technical cooperation.

The SAARCFINANCE Database (SFDB) is being built to provide consistent and robust macroeconomic and socioeconomic time series data, which are somewhat comparable, on SAARC countries. Data in the SFDB are presented sector-wise and frequency-wise, that can be downloaded and saved in different formats, including MS Excel, for further processing and analysis.

The objective of development of the SAARC Finance Database (SFDB) is to promote research on economic and financial issues for the mutual benefit of SAARC member countries, so that the member central banks take the mutual policy cooperation forward, and can take a common position on issues of interest to the region in the international fora. One of the important pre-requisites for conducting effective research is the availability of consistent and comparable time series macroeconomic and financial data across the member countries. Accordingly, the SAARCFINANCE database aims at building a time series database on important macroeconomic and socioeconomic variables of member countries, for enabling research. The SFDB is still in its infancy and efforts are on by member central banks to expand the coverage of data, both across variables, frequency and time series. As the accounting periods and the data availability is not uniform across SAARC member countries, building a robust database with comparable data sets remains the long-term objective of the initiative.

Metadata is the information such as the definitions, accounting periods, conventions, etc, that are used to compile the data. This information is helpful in appreciating the data better, particularly when it is being used to compare with data of other it summarizes basic information about data which can make finding and working with particular instances of data easier. In the SAARCFINANC database, metadata includes information about the datasets being published through a standard structure sector-wise (Real sector, Money and Banking, Public Finance and External sector).

The member central banks would be responsible for contributing the data along with their metadata on their respective national economies, at regular frequency. The Reserve Bank of India is responsible for contributing data on India and collating/integrating the data/meta data received from other central banks into the SFDB.

The SFDB aims at providing data on important macroeconomic and socioeconomic paramters of SAARC countries. However, the data availability, in terms of coverage, frequency, methodology of compilation, availability of back data time series and reporting are not uniform across SAARC countries. Given that our objective is to provide data which are largely comparable across countries, the SFDB at present provides data on few macroeconomic indicators such as real sector, money and banking, public fianance and external sector accounts. The data coverage begins from 2001. The data are provided in Annual/Quarterly/Monthly frequencies, as they are available with respective source countries. Therefore, data with higher frequencies may not be available for all countries. The coverage of time series, where available could be different for different countries. The SAARCFINANCE central banks are endeavouring to expand data coverage further.

In order to contact SFDB officials; please visit https://dbieold.rbi.org.in/DBIE/dbie.rbi?site=saarcHome and then go to Contact us . You can also write to us at sfdbhelp@rbi.org.in