THE Guyana Bureau of Statistics (GNBS) is advancing steadily in its objective to provide the latest information on Guyana’s living conditions within the economy.

This is being made possible through the conduct of a $158M-government funded Household Budget and Living Condition Survey.

As the country approaches ‘first oil’ in 2020, this information will be very useful to policymakers aiming to ensure that every Guyanese receives the economic benefits needed to live a comfortable life.

In an interview with the Guyana Chronicle, Deputy Chief Statistician at the Bureau, Ian Manifold, stated that the survey commenced in November and will conclude on October 2019.

“You’re going to have information there that the policymakers would be able to examine… especially persons’ standard of living; this is very important,” said Manifold.
In explaining the survey, he said that it will give a sense of a household’s total

consumption and expenditures broken down in sufficient detail and characteristics such as the size and composition, degree of urbanisation, region and more.

“The whole idea of the household budget survey is for us to capture the seasonality as it relates to income, living standards and so on in Guyana. We want to have a look in terms of people’s expenditure and income in terms of their financial aspect of the household,” Manifold said, adding: “This information also provides us with a sense of their living standards.”

Household Budget Surveys (HBSs) are multi-purpose surveys which cater for a large number of uses and users.

The data collected involves a combination of one or more interviews and diaries or logs maintained by households and/or individuals, generally on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, the expenditure made by households to acquire goods and services is recorded at the price actually paid, which includes indirect taxes (VAT and excise duties) borne by the purchaser.

“The survey has many, many purposes in the sense that we want to do some rebasing. We have our current basket of goods for the Consumer Price Index (CPI)and that was based on prices in 2006, so we want to update that basket; get a fresh basket of goods that could speak to the changes in prices over time in Guyana,” Manifold explained.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) can also be used to measure inflation in a country.
Other benefits of the survey include it being used as an input to building the national accounts for the purpose of measuring Household Final Consumption (HFC) at an aggregate level.

WIDE SAMPLE
Delving into the details regarding how it will be conducted, the statistician noted that a sample of 6,000 households will be targeted, stretched across the 10 administrative regions.

“Those regions with greater population like Region Four, of course, we will visit more persons relative to Regions Seven and Eight. But the idea is that we’re going to go across the country,” Manifold explained.
He also noted that the households will come from random villages and will be randomly selected, while the bureau has around 34 enumerators and some 12 supervisors on the project.
These facilitators utilise technology to input their information for faster conduct of the exercises and production of end results.

“All our surveys now are tablet-based, so you don’t have this situation where you collect the paper; the paper comes to the office and you have to code it; check for accuracy and then get another set of people to input it into the system and then have it checked for errors and all of these quality control issues. So we ought to save a lot of time and get results out much quicker,” he stated.

Added to this, there will be quarterly presentations and comparisons of the data collected.
However, Manifold said that although the survey has just begun, the bureau has already noticed the possibility of future challenges.

“We wanted to start very early; we were looking at 2020 as the election year because we wanted to make sure that we were way out of the field by October and we’re not caught up in the election period. Unfortunately, we don’t have a choice because we started the survey and we’ll have to see how this plays out,” he explained.

“Historically, you don’t ever want to be conducting field work while an election is in process because what happens is that when we come to your house, you may be exceptional to understand the difference between persons coming to ask you to vote as against people coming to do a survey. [But] it’s kind of cumbersome because if I’m leaning towards a particular party, I may see the survey as being biased for another party. Things like that.”
However, Manifold said that the team views each survey activity as a learning process and is confident that with the experience garnered, they will be able to produce the much-needed information and on time.

“We’re very optimistic that we’re going to get our work done for the first quarter and then for the subsequent quarters,” he said.