The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has announced that the newly rebased Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures will be unveiled by the end of January 2025.
The NBS stated this on Thursday during a sensitisation workshop on GDP and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rebasing, organized by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) and the NBS in Lagos.
GDP rebasing is re-calculating a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) using new base years, prices, and methodologies. This is typically done to reflect changes in the economy, update the basket of goods and services used to calculate GDP and improve the accuracy of economic data.
The agency said given the current economic realities, Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP) is long overdue for rebasing.
It explained that given the relative expenditure or weights of individual goods and services change over time, the new items in the CPI basket, and changing consumption patterns among others, the rebasing is necessary to get the accurate economic health of the country.
Speaking during the workshop, Technical Assistant to the Statistician General, Moses Waniko, said the last time the Nigerian GDP was rebased was in 2014 using 2010 as the base year.
He said ordinarily GDP rebasing should be done every five years.
He said that the choice of 2019 as the new base year was informed by the year’s status as a period of “relative economic stability” compared to other recent years, which were marked by significant economic shocks.
He noted that 2019 was chosen because other sector-specific administrative data for this period were collected.Waniko emphasized that the data collection process is nearing completion. However, the results will still need to undergo validation before the official launch at the end of the month.
According to him, “We’re currently concluding the rebasing. We need to validate the results, and then we have to do a launch; we are looking at the end of January to do that launch, to disseminate the numbers.”
Waniko noted several key benefits the rebased GDP would have on the national economy.
He said that the GDP rebasing should be viewed not only in terms of aggregate numbers but also in terms of their distribution, weights, and contributions across different sectors.
He said, “It is good to look at the rebasing from different angles, not just the aggregate numbers, but to look at what those numbers are supposed to tell us, in terms of the distribution, the aggregate numbers, in terms of their weights, contributions and the rest.
“Beyond that, there are other implications for the national economy, which we have tried to put in this slide. The first is rebasing will provide or allow for an Economic and Development Plan.
“The second is that the rebasing will really help to provide a good trajectory for the economy. So beyond this, it’s important to also state that after the rebasing, there are certain things that we expect that might change, such as changes in the size of the structure of the economy.
“We expect that the size of the economy will be bigger,” Waniko noted that the tax-to-GDP ratio is something that people may want to see what the numbers would look like. “Debt to GDP ratio of 18.5 per cent as of September 2019 could also reduce with the bigger size of the GDP, and then per-capita income will increase after the rebasing.”(Guardian)
