View: India shouldn’t let its data turn Chinese
That has, quietly, changed. While few believe Indian statisticians are actively working to make growth numbers look better than they are, less and less data is publicly available, methods are less transparent, and the GDP figures in particular sometimes diverge puzzlingly from independent data.
The minister in charge of statistics recently told Parliament that the government planned to ask a new committee to recommend how it should update its national accounts. Official statisticians should seize this opportunity to overhaul how India’s GDP is calculated in order to win back trust.
The government’s justification for the update is that India’s data is still based on prices dating back to the financial year that ended in March 2012. Such “rebasing” is a chance for wholesale reform — particularly because the last time the GDP series was revised was exactly when questions first began to be asked about its reliability.
Statisticians have a much harder task in India than in the West or even in China. For one, the economy is dominated by services, rather than by manufacturing. It can be easier to value aggregate output in industrial sectors that produce a defined output with a clear price.
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