Short-term macroeconomic fluctuations are increasingly affecting the socio-economic wellbeing of people in countries all over the world. Many developing economies including Arab economies fall far short in providing policy/decision makers with a complete set of reliable short-term economic indicators. They also lack experience and technical knowledge in producing and disseminating such indicators. This results in exclusion or severely limited participation of these economies in building an early warning system for economic and financial crises. 
 
In line with the ongoing international efforts for capacity building, and the growing need of member countries to technical assistance on short-term indicators, the Statistics Division at UN-ESCWA is currently implementing the project “Strengthening the Statistical Capacity of ESCWA Member Countries in Producing and Disseminating Short-term Economic Indicators for Sustainable Growth”, in collaboration with UNSD, ECA, ESCAP and the IMF,  to strengthen the capacity of member countries in producing and disseminating a core set of priority short-economic indicators of appropriate quality and timeliness together with their related metadata in order to facilitate review of the economic performance and provide a basis for the preparation of future performance.