New Delhi:The sharp revision in quarterly GDP data has grabbed the eyeballs of economists and experts and the government has also received flak over it.
The debate still continues over whether the revision of the previous quarter's GDP growth numbers were justified or not.
State Bank of India (SBI) Group Chief Economic Adviser, Soumya Kanti Ghosh, in a report, has questioned the data quality and 'remarkable' volatility in the new series adopted by the CSO that has led to frequent sharp revisions in GDP numbers in each of quarterly estimates with wide upward and downward swings in numbers in each of the quarter estimate from excisions.
Noting that the loss of economic activity due to the lockdown in last few days of March has dragged GDP growth to a 40-quarter low of 3.1 per cent in Q4 FY20, he said: "However, CSO has significantly revised the previous quarters' growth rates (compared to Q3 release) which is quite puzzling and raises questions about data quality and remarkable volatility in the new series and we believe that a methodological note from CSO explaining the frequent revisions will be very useful."
The SBI Ecowrap report, authored by Ghosh, said that in February, the quarterly numbers underwent significant upward revisions and such numbers have now been steeply revised downwards by an almost equal amount, within a span of three months.
"While it is customary to change the quarterly numbers in May when the 3rd estimate of FY20 is released, the extent of such revision reveals possibly the loss in Q4 because of lockdown may have been evenly distributed across quarters/Rs 1.18 lakh crore loss estimated and distributed across quarters in FY20 (Q4 accounted for only 50 per cent of such)," it said.
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Talking to IANS, former Chief Statistician of India Pronab Sen said that the fourth quarter numbers are fine, but the revision of the third quarter numbers was the major problem which should have been avoided as it was out of schedule.
"As far as changes were concerned, the changes that were released during this fourth quarter... those are fine. There is no problem at all, that is how it should be. The problem here was the change made with the third quarter data. That was problematic, that was off schedule."