China

We’ve just added an alternative transportation dataset for China, sourced from the Ministry of Finance. It’s the “willingness index” for highway traffic between cities. So far, only traffic from Shanghai or Beijing to other Chinese cities is available.

This index is calculated by tracking the behaviour of people using the Autonavi navigation tool to search and plan driving routes. It seeks to measure people's desire to travel, rather than actual trips.

In the chart below, we aggregated the willingness indices for trips from Beijing and Shanghai to all potential destinations. As an illustration of the breadth of coverage, the two aggregated indices shown in the chart have 110 underlying indices for individual routes. 

Notable moves include the spike earlier this month, largely due to the Golden Year holiday, and the subsequent decline; that drop occurred amid an increase in the number of districts considered medium- or high-risk for coronavirus (as the second chart shows). Given China’s zero-Covid policy, that may weigh on the willingness to travel in coming weeks.   

New Zealand

For New Zealand, we’ve added a new business survey provided by Xero that covers small-business trends. The dataset has various components, including:

• Job creators
• Job downsizers
• Jobs growth
• Late payments
• Sales growth
• Time to be paid
• Wage growth
  

All these sub-indices are available by industry and region. In the chart below, we display wage growth across industries, graphed against the New Zealand inflation rate. After a surge in wages during the pandemic recovery period of early 2021, the inflation spike resulted in a second wave of wage increases in 2022. 

Vietnam

Macrobond users can now access more granular data on Vietnam with the addition of foreign direct investment inflows per country. The dataset is sourced from the Vietnamese Ministry of Planning & Investment. 

Unsurprisingly, the largest Asian economies (China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore) represent the largest proportion of FDI inflows But it’s worth noting the increased presence of the Netherlands in 2021, responsible for registered FDI of about USD 5 billion. 

Saudi Arabia

We continue to expand our data coverage for Saudi Arabia and have now added gross external debt, sourced from SAMA, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority. 

External debt grew significantly in 2020, reaching 37 percemt of GDP. With the economic recovery and double-digit GDP growth in 2022, external debt is returning to pre-pandemic levels.