Statistics quality an underlying theme of the survey

Relooking data from stats ministry

Amidst a focus on sustaining economic growth, controlling inflation and boosting exports, the Economic Survey also has an undercurrent on emphasising data quality and improving the country’s statistical system.

“The government is taking many steps aimed at strengthening administrative and survey statistics, building capacities and improving data quality and timeliness,” the survey noted.

The survey highlighted the need to update the base year of important indicators like the gross domestic product, Consumer Price Index and the Index of Industrial Production, which are used to estimate economic growth, inflation and production, but also argued for integration of other databases to help in decision-making.

For instance, in the case of essential commodities, the survey stressed the need to link databases in such a way that the government could track any build-up in prices.

On the goods and services tax front, the survey pointed out that granular data could help the government get a handle on the health of businesses.

“There is also a need to have a regular mechanism to aggregate the financial flows to infrastructure and physical progress—sectorally and geographically differentiated—achieved in different infrastructure sectors, at least on an annual basis,” it said.

Moreover, it underlined the need for state-level data on indices like the IIP.

The approach to data already builds on existing efforts by Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) to fast-track release of reports like the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises and Annual Survey of Industries.

“Survey data to help understand private sector capital formation at regular intervals will also help policy formulation,” it said.

Moneycontrol had earlier reported that the ministry was also looking to increase the frequency of data like the urban unemployment numbers from the periodic labour force survey, which at present is released quarterly, and rural unemployment, which has an annual release calendar.

“To encourage greater use of administrative data, a National Metadata Structure is also being developed. The Unified Data Portal project has been envisaged by MoSPI with the objective of creating a centralised database and storage system,” the survey noted.