VCIx Methodology

1. What the number means

VCIx publishes two paired measures from five equally weighted pillars: a zero-centred Activity factor and a –100 to +100 Breadth balance. The former chain-linked level remains available only as a legacy audit series.

Activity measures whether the panel's directional year-over-year growth is stronger or weaker than its own recent norm. Breadth measures how widely improvement or deterioration is shared across the available pillars. Positive is stronger or broader; negative is weaker or narrower.

Activity is not a percentage, has no maximum of 100, and is not a completion score. Zero does not mean no activity: it means the panel is at its recent directional-growth norm. Breadth is bounded, but +100 means all available pillars are improving, not that Venezuela is fully recovered.

Activity deliberately has no arbitrary base year. An earlier version claimed a 2012 benchmark, but the underlying data could not support it: publishing that base would require invented values. The legacy chain-linked series uses 2021=100 only as an audit reference and is not the public headline.

2. How it is built

Six reproducible steps, in order. None creates or fills an observation.

1. 1

   Eligibility

   A series enters only if it is explicitly named in CORE_PANEL v1.4 and clears the existing real-history, freshness, source-class, methodology, and collision gates. Missing or unusable inputs stay absent; they are never estimated.

2. 2

   Monthly resampling

   Every admitted series is aligned to one value per calendar month using the existing, disclosed carry budgets: two months for daily, weekly and monthly series, six for quarterly, and twenty-four for annual. Beyond that budget the signal is absent, not flat.

3. 3

   Directional 12-month change

   Positive quantities use 100 × log(current / twelve-month-prior). For lower-is-better rates such as monthly inflation, the signal is prior minus current in percentage points, so disinflation is positive without dividing by a rate that can approach zero. Zero or non-positive quantities cannot produce a log change and remain absent.

4. 4

   Causal robust standardization

   Each directional change is compared only with that series' history available through the same month: at least six signals and at most the latest sixty. The centre is the median and the scale is 1.4826 times median absolute deviation, with sample standard deviation used only when MAD is zero. Each standardized component is capped at ±3.

5. 5

   Source-family and pillar votes

   Metrics from the same named source family are averaged before entering a pillar, so multiple cuts of one publisher cannot gain extra votes. Source families are averaged within each pillar; the available pillars then receive equal votes. With five available pillars, each contributes 20%.

2.5 The panel

The index does not auto-admit anything with enough history: the constituents are an explicit, versioned editorial decision, named here with the cadence and source grade behind each one.

3. What is in it right now

Live, from the most recent Activity computation. A pillar with no qualified signal is published as no signal rather than as a neutral value; the available pillars receive equal votes.

4. What this number does not support

Everything below is a known weakness of the current index, published because a reader cannot evaluate the number without it. None of it is hypothetical; each item is measured.

• The history is revised-history, not a real-time vintage backtest

  The calculation is causal — a month uses no future signal — but the site did not preserve every release vintage. Historical Activity is reconstructed from the latest observation revisions, so it cannot show exactly what a user would have seen on each past release date.

• The panel is thin

  The count below is the number of series actually contributing in the latest month. Some pillars are currently carried by a single constituent. A composite this narrow will move on single-series news, and month-to-month volatility should be read in that light rather than as economic signal.

• The panel does not cover the whole economy

  Panel v1.4 is a deliberately limited editorial basket. Admission now requires real observations at each series' own cadence, not carried-forward months; that fixes the earlier admission defect, but it does not make a small basket comprehensive. An economic change not represented by one of the panel's signals may not appear in the index.

• Zero is a relative norm, not a neutral economy

  Activity compares each series with its own recent directional-growth distribution. A zero reading can coexist with severe absolute conditions; it says momentum is near the panel's recent norm, not that the economy is healthy or fully recovered.

• Sources have different grades

5. Provenance

The rule this project runs on: every observation must be traceable to a real, checkable origin. A number that cannot be traced is fabricated, however plausible it looks. A series has provenance only if all three of the following hold.

1. 1A real, named, reachable source — a genuine institution or site with a working link. A placeholder or catch-all source name is not provenance.
2. 2A collector that can be re-run, or a documented manual entry that can be re-checked, reproducing the value.
3. 3A recorded methodology, or derivation from other provenanced series by code in the repository. Derived metrics inherit provenance from their inputs plus the formula, and are attributed to a derived source — never to an external institution they did not come from.

Prohibited outright: inventing values to fill a chart or an empty page; interpolating, extrapolating or backfilling a reasonable estimate and presenting it as an observation; attributing a number to an institution that did not publish it; and adding jitter to make generated data look observed. The last two are not hypothetical — both have happened here and are recorded below.

An empty pillar, a null value, or not currently measured is always the correct output when data is absent. The index publishes nulls rather than neutral placeholders, which is why some pillars above may read no signal.

What has been deleted

Two purges of fabricated or unsourced data, both on 2026-08-07. Backups of every deleted row are retained in the repository so the deletions are auditable rather than merely asserted.

6. Source grading

Every observation carries a source class and a confidence class. Higher classes take precedence when values conflict; lower classes are shown with explicit caveats rather than hidden.

• Class A

  Official statistical agency or regulator

• Class B

  Company filings and reputable secondary aggregators

• Class C

  Credible estimates and market monitors

• Class D

  Proxies and thinly documented signals

Confidence classes are assigned per observation, alongside a review status. What each actually claims — and what it does not — is in section 6.5.

6.5 What “verified” means here

Every observation also carries a review status — verified or pending. Read on its own, “verified” sounds like a person checked the number. That is not what it means on this site, and the gap between those two readings is worth stating outright rather than leaving a reader to assume the friendlier one.

Some data on this site is entered and checked by a person, and says so — the funding-round records behind the VC pillar, for instance, are a documented manual research pass, not a collector. Reading every verified row as unreviewed would be its own kind of overstatement. What changed is only that the verified label stopped being read as a promise that this happened on every row it appears on.

Confidence — high, medium or low — tracks the same thing as review status: how well the collection path is documented, not a forecast of how close the number will turn out to be. A high-confidence observation is fully documented and can still be revised if its source revises it; a medium- or low-confidence one is thinner on paper, not necessarily more wrong.

7. Collection cadence

Counted from the live catalogue, not from a list maintained by hand.

• daily41 series — P2P USDT/VES Rate, Banco de Venezuela — Close (BVL), Banco Provincial — Close (BPV)…
• weekly7 series — Bank Credit Portfolio (VES), Bank Credit-to-Deposits Ratio, Nominal Bank Credit Growth (YoY)…
• monthly32 series — Oil Exports (volume), Brent Crude Price, Inflation (MoM)…
• quarterly2 series — VC Rounds (quarterly), VC Capital Deployed
• annual18 series — Mirror Imports — Electrical/Telecom, Air Passengers, Mirror Imports — Machinery…

8. Sources

Every source currently feeding an active series, counted from the catalogue. If a source appears here it has at least one live series behind it.

• world-bank

  feeds 6 series

  Class A

• un-comtrade

  feeds 5 series

  Class A

• bcv

  feeds 4 series

  Class A

• bcv-payments-archive

  feeds 3 series

  Class A

• bcv-payment-channels

  feeds 2 series

  Class A

• cavenez

  feeds 2 series

  Class A

• jodi-oil

  feeds series