2 weeks Ago By Abdulwahab Isa
The Statistician General of the Federation, Prince Adeyemi Adeniran, has said the planned re-basing of Gross Domestic Products (GDP), Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Nigeria Living Standards Survey (NLSS) by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS ) aligns with the current economic realities and international best practice. Adeniran, who is also thebChief Executive Officer, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), on Thursday in Abuja, said: “We can be comparing the data that we collect from markets every month with a recent period that we call base year. “The rebasing of Gross Domestic Products is the process of replacing an old base year with a new one, a recent one, that is known as the reference period to keep up with the evolution in prices.
Economies, as you know, undergo structural changes over time. “For instance, we can have growth in technology. We can change the entire sphere of the structure of our economy, the consumption pattern of households, through emerging technologies that we see growing and also decline of traditional way of producing goods and services.
You can see, for instance, the kind of vehicle that is being produced now. You can see that there are transformations.” “Some of them are not using the usual fossil fuel that we know.
Now, we are having electric-powered vehicles. We have battery-powered vehicles, as the case may be” he added. Explaining further on the differences among the three economic indicators, he said that while NLSS mirrors into the household welfare of Nigerians, GDP and CPI ensured that economic data aligns with international best practices.
“The NLSS provides invaluable insights into household welfare, consumption pattern, and expenditure, which enable us to measure the national poverty headline rates and other essential indicators relating to welfare of the households. “The replacement of GDP and CPI, on the other hand, ensures that our economic data aligns with international best practices and capture the dynamic sectors and activities within our economy. “For information and clarity, the NLSS is the survey under which the national poverty headline rate is generated, along with other useful household welfare, consumption, and expenditure indicators,” he said, adding that “the survey is conducted every four to five years, with the penultimate one conducted in 2018 to 2019, and it was published in 2020” The NLSS, he said, was released during the COVID lockdown period, which produced headline poverty rates of 40.
1 per cent, and about 82 million Nigerians under poverty at that time..
