An Investigation into Some Contentious Issues of GDP Estimation

The new series of national accounts statistics in India, with 2011-12 as the base year, has extensively made use of data as reported in the annual accounts of companies filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs under their e-governance initiative. This paper attempts to draw conclusion about the adequacy of coverage of such data and also suggests alternatives to the present approach of use of ‘blowing-up factor’ to scale up the contribution of gross value added of sample companies for estimating total contribution of gross value added by the corporate sector. The paper also makes an assessment of the impact of not using the ‘double deflation’ method on the annual growth rates of gross value added by the manufacturing sector for two years, i.e., 2012-13 and 2013-14. Finally, the relative behaviour of growth rate of total gross value added by ‘quasi-corporate’ units of the Annual Survey of Industries and the household segment of manufacturing sector during the intervening period of 2005-06 and 2010-11 has been studied and the effect of using the former growth rate to move forward the benchmark estimate of gross value added by the household segment of manufacturing sector has been commented upon.