How Narwhal validates official economic data
The source, validation, storage, and revision rules behind every public Economics API response.
Narwhal turns national statistical releases into one predictable contract. It preserves the source period, unit, release date, and interpretation fields instead of flattening unlike indicators into an ambiguous number.
Official sources only
Each live stream starts with a government statistics office or another official national publisher. Narwhal does not blend a commercial estimate into an official CPI, labour, GDP, or merchandise-trade series.
The current publishers include the ABS, Statistics Canada, Destatis, INSEE, the ONS, Japan's national statistics agencies, DOSM, SingStat, the BLS, the BEA, and the US Census Bureau. The coverage matrix shows which publishers and cadences apply to each country.
A release passes as a complete publication
A scheduled source check retrieves a candidate release and verifies its identity, period, required fields, units, and completeness. The observations and their source evidence are stored together. Only a complete release that passes the required checks becomes available to customer requests.
If a candidate is incomplete or fails validation, Narwhal keeps the last accepted publication available. It never replaces a missing value with zero or mixes part of a failed release with an older publication.
One contract without erasing meaning
The nine country operations share stable REST paths and MCP tools, but indicator-specific context remains explicit. CPI keeps its base period and base value. GDP keeps its price basis, seasonal adjustment, and annualization. Trade keeps its currency and merchandise coverage.
Decimal values are returned as strings so clients do not silently lose precision. Missing values remain missing. The Economics API reference documents the fields and accepted period format for every operation.
Freshness and revisions
Customer requests read Narwhal's stored accepted data; they do not wait for a government website. The period identifies the observation, while released_on records the official publication date.
Official agencies can revise earlier figures. When a revised publication passes the same checks, it can replace the value previously stored for that period. Narwhal does not currently expose an ingestion timestamp or promise a fixed source-to-publication delay during the public beta. See the exact freshness contract.
Current limitations
- Coverage is limited to the nine countries and nine operations listed on the public coverage pages.
- Cadence follows the official source and is not made artificially more frequent.
- Merchandise trade excludes services trade; filtered partner and product totals can remain unavailable.
- Economic data can be delayed, corrected, or revised by its publisher.
- The public beta has no service-level guarantee and is not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.
For operational behavior, read errors and quota. For country-level scope, open the country directory.