The availability of short term economic indicators to monitor economic activities has become crucial at national, regional, and global level. These indicators provide a valuable tool for understanding the ongoing economic developments and thereby help in assessing economic performance trends in a forward looking manner. The recent global economic and financial crises have generated a number of challenges for the official statistician to produce and prompt availability of key short�term economic indicators for monitoring the impact of the crises and tracing the economic movement. 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. This project aims at strengthening national capacities in the production, use, and dissemination of short-term economic indicators in order to make available the tools necessary for policy formulation and monitoring with a view to increasing resilience to shocks and fostering economic development. On the basis of existing international standards, such as those published by the United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Organization of Economic and Co-operation Development (OECD), the Statistical Office of European Communities (Eurostat) and other relevant international agencies, the project will provide compilers in the ESCWA member countries with methodological aspects, concepts and definitions, to upgrade and enhance their knowledge and skills to produce and disseminate short term economic indicators in accordance with those standards. Expert groups, training workshops and advisory services planned in the project will guarantee the capacity building of national compilers, the exchange of regional and global best practices and knowledge sharing, the establishment of a regional network of experts and, at the end, the dissemination of the project results.