GDP more than aggregation of high-frequency indicators: Pronab Sen, India’s first chief statistician

We don’t feel the GDP growth on the ground because the statistics ministry’s estimates come in a long series. We start with the first estimate (e.g. 7.8% for Q1, released on August 31) and then these estimates are revised multiple times as more data comes in. You get the final estimates only after two years. Therefore, people get confused. What this means is that 7.8% is not the final number.

The GDP estimates are a lot more than just the aggregation of the high-frequency data. They bring in all sorts of other things and in certain cases, that data set has been improved a lot. For instance, we have the Periodic Labour Force Survey for quite some time as an input to the GDP estimation process. The new one on the block is the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE), also conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. It is not high-frequency because it is an annual report, but it gives you a realistic measure of what is happening in the unorganised sector. This is a dataset that really needs to be tracked because in the corporate sector for which we get data regularly, things are much more stable. ASUSE data is more expansive than the corporate bit.

On the consumption side, we usually don’t have an independent measure of this indicator. If you are really looking at something like the cost of living, you still need to look at the consumer price index (CPI). If you are looking at the cost of production, you would look at the wholesale price index (WPI). If you’re looking at how much the producers are getting, then you will look at the producer price index (PPI). One can do combinations of these to infer other things as well. The high-frequency indicators have not changed much.


(As told to Kirtika Suneja)