ICAE-Haiti White Paper: the Economic Activity Indicator

This IHSI white paper documents the construction of Haiti's Indicateur Conjoncturel d'Activité Économique, a short-term economic activity indicator intended to replace the previous conjunctural indicators published by IHSI. The document explains the rationale for the ICAE, its conceptual frame, its use, its coverage relative to GDP, limitations and improvement prospects, the general construction process, mathematical expression, detailed branch-level methodology and dissemination plan. It covers agricultural, extractive, manufacturing, electricity and water, construction, commerce, hotel and restaurant, transport, telecommunications, financial, real-estate, education, health and non-market branches.

It describes data sources, weighting structures, deflation, temporal disaggregation using ECOTRIM, Laspeyres-type quantum indices and weighted aggregation across components. The reference base is 2007-2008, and the document states that the ICAE structure covers about 79.8 percent of annual national-accounts branches under that reference. Annexes compare ICAE results with GDP and other conjunctural indicators, provide branch weighting structures, include the first ICAE bulletin and list contributors from IHSI, INEGI and ECLAC. The white paper is therefore both a methodological guide and an institutional record of the Haitian statistical system's move toward a more timely short-term activity indicator.