Editorial policy

WorldRealDebt is an independent data visualisation project that reads debt and macroeconomic indicators from official primary sources. This page is the editorial policy: it states how the numbers are chosen, what their limits are, and how they get corrected.

Source priority

Every indicator starts from an official publication — central bank, finance ministry, statistics office or international institution. Supplementary sources such as the IMF, the World Bank, the BIS, the OECD or Eurostat are shown alongside only when no direct official series exists, or when a common basis is needed for cross-country comparison.

Interpolation formula

The live numbers are not measurements. They are estimates that bridge the gap between official releases. The base formula is `value(t) = base × (1 + g)^((t - t0) / 1y)`, where `base` is the official reference value, `g` is the annual growth rate and `t0` is the reference date. Policy shocks, seasonality and intra-month movements are not automatically reflected in the model.

Confidence labels

Each indicator carries one of three confidence labels: `official`, `estimate` or `proxy`. `official` is taken directly from an official release, `estimate` is derived by combining credible sources, and `proxy` stands in for a series that does not exist directly and is approximated by a related indicator.

Editorial responsibility

Data curation, methodology review, reference-date checks and citation quality are handled by the WorldRealDebt Editorial Team. Individual changes remain in the public repository commit history, and material changes to reference values are reflected in the sources page and in the API fields `baseAsOf`, `meta` and `citeAs`.

Separation of advertising and editorial

Advertising does not influence editorial judgement. Ad areas are labelled with the policy-compliant `Advertisements` wording, and no copy is used that encourages ad clicks or blurs the line between an ad and the article.