…poverty margin to be revised
The Bureau of Statistics in the coming months will launch a Household Budget and Living Condition Survey, Chief Statistician Lennox Benjamin disclosed on Thursday.
Benjamin, at the time, was speaking during the launch of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) Round 6 at the Ministry of Finance. He explained that a sample of the population will be surveyed to measure the consumption pattern, and level of expenditure of persons living in Guyana with the aim of revising the poverty margin. Guyana Chronicle understands that approximately 6,000 households from across the 10 administrative will be surveyed under the project which will be funded using some $158M.
“Essentially we will be generating a new level, a current level of consumption expenditure in the country and a new demarcation of the poverty line. Those who are living below poverty,’ Benjamin subsequently explained to reporters. He noted that the Household Budget and Living Condition Survey was conducted in 2006. Based on the last 36.1 per cent of the population is living in moderate poverty.
“It is also a major input, and as you know we will be doing a rebasing of our economy, rebasing meaning the base on which we measure the performance and growth of the economy, so we need to know this definitively before we start pumping oil, what we were doing before and what we are doing after,” he posited.
Currently, the country’s GDP is compiled relative to the base year 2006. The Guyana Bureau of Statistics (GBS) explains that a country compiles its GDP at current and constant prices by industry, mainly by the production method.
GDP by expenditure is compiled residually for the economy as a whole, and at current prices only. Earlier in the area, Finance Minister Winston Jordan had explained that the downfall of the sugar industry in 2017 was negatively influencing the country’s economic growth. Last year, the country fell short in achieving its projected growth rate of 3.8 per cent.
Instead, it recorded a real growth rate of 2.9 per cent. The performance of the ailing sugar industry was in part responsible for the decline, but the Finance Ministry hopes to reduce its influence on the economy this year.
“This rebasing will see the lowering of the influence of sugar in our growth rate,” he added, noting that with sugar projected to do a mere 115,000 tonnes, its overall influence in the economy has dropped considerably.
He further explained that as a result of the GDP and the series that is in use, the sugar industry still has a major influence on the growth of the economy and “in a sense it drags down the growth.” “Hopefully with the rebasing, we can see a truer picture of the performance of the economy,” Minister Jordan posited.
According to the Bureau of Statistics, the rebasing and revising of the national accounts, which was conducted during 2007 to 2009, allowed not only the adoption of a more recent base year (previously 1988), but facilitated the use of more modern measurement techniques and a truer picture of economic structure. It was further explained that in the rebased and revised series, the increasing contribution of services to the economy and the subsequent diminishing contribution of traditional industries are evident. Data is collected on the output of the real and services industries of the economy.
