The Statistician General of the Federation and Director General of the National Bureau of Statistics, Dr. Yemi Kale, has said that the current structure of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is outdated.
He said this on Business Morning while discussing the National Bureau of Statistics’s plan to rebase the GDP.
Rebasing the country’s GDP “is about getting our figures right” because it should be done every 5 years, as is the practice in many countries in the world, he said.
He further disclosed that the rebasing exercise was last carried out in 1990.
“We are basing our GDP which is basically structured by the economy and which policies have been based on a pattern, structure that existed in 1990.”
Changes in products, technology, policies over the past 23 years are yet to take effect on the current structure of the nation’s GDP, hence “we might, at the end of the day, misinform decision makers and therefore get our policies wrong”.
