Quarterly GDP to be disseminated from 2017 – Guyana Bureau of Statistics reveals

The Guyana Bureau of Statistics will be releasing quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP) updates from 2017, said Senior Economic Statistician Ivor Coates on Thursday at the agency’s end of year press conference at Cara Lodge.

Coates stated that while the economic system would have changed overtime, Guyana’s national accounts is based at the year 2006, which is 10 years since the Bureau’s last rebasing.

Nevertheless, he announced that the agency is working to rebase the national accounts system to 2018 in light of the recent oil find.

“Statistics is more than what the Bureau does, it involves the entire economy, every single household, and our work entails more than what was done in 2012. It involves what goes into the National Budget as well,” he said, adding that they are responsible for the GDP which was presented in Parliament.

He stated that they are always pressing themselves to do more and so in 2017, they will commence a series of quarterly disseminations of GDP estimates.

“…I know data users are excited about that we are being asked on a regular basis about quarterly estimates and more timely data. Before the end of the first quarter of 2017, we will have our first data series of quarterly GDP,” he said.

He mentioned that they are also hoping to rebase their GDP estimates to the year 2020 and that work will be ongoing. It has already started with support from the Canadians.

Presently, Guyana’s GDP stands at a dismal 2.6 per cent.