AMID rising criticisms of the country’s statistical agencies, the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) has urged the government and the private sector to increase their investments in statistics.

NSCB executive director Romulo Virola said there is a need to increase the advocacy for good statistics to effectively contribute to sound decision-making and that both the government and the private sector play important roles in highlighting the importance of statisticians and statistics in society.

Virola also called on the National Statistics Office (NSO) to strive to produce critical statistics that reach even the “provincial level of disaggregation” that would contribute significantly to good statistics. The NSO, he said, should also disseminate data on a timely manner.

“The government and the private sector must invest in statistics and appreciate the important role of statisticians and statistics in society,” Virola recently said in his regular online column “Statistically Speaking.”

“The local government units [LGUs] must also develop the capacity and the political will to generate statistics themselves,” he added.

Virola also answered questions raised by former National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) director generals, such as Dr. Felipe Medalla and Dr. Cielito Habito, regarding the accuracy of the Philippine System of National Accounts (PSNA).

The NSCB chief explained that the PSNA statistics are not the same as the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) statistics. Virola said the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) from the PSNA is not the same as the Family/Household Expenditures from the FIES in the same way that the Disposable Income of the Household Sector from the PSNA is not the same as the Family Income from the FIES.

“If these terms are conceptually different, why should their growth rates be the same? Simple arithmetic should be able to explain why not. However, since these sets of terms are conceptually close to each other, one can expect the trends to be the same. Indeed they are, and not only before 2001, as our official statistics show,” Virola said.

“If we look at the PSNA PCE and the FIES Total Family Expenditures at Current Prices, their trends are definitely not divergent. In fact, even the PSNA compensation inflow and the total factor income inflow [compensation plus property income] and the total family expenditures [FIES] show similar trends. Note also that between 1985 and 1988,  the growth rate of PCE was higher than that of Total Family Expenditures, just like it was after 1997,” Virola added.

With these reasons, Virola said he firmly believes that the two former Neda chiefs are not insinuating that the NSCB tried to mar the credibility of the agency in coming up with reliable economic data.

“I am convinced that no way are they accusing us in the NSCB of deliberately manipulating the figures. But also, I  do not understand the ‘inconsistencies’ they are talking about,” Virola said.

The NSCB chief also defended the 2007 gross domestic product (GDP) of 7.3 percent and said that the only reason why this does not reflect the results of the latest poverty statistics is the fact that the poverty incidence that were recently released accounted the poverty incidence between 2003 and 2006.

Virola also said that in the past, the NSCB has said that economic growth does not always have to translate to actual reduction in poverty.

“If there is economic growth but the rich gets richer or the income distribution becomes even more unequal, or prices of commodities purchased by the poor rise too fast, poverty can indeed worsen. That is why it is very important for the rich and the famous among our civil society to nurture that virtue of social responsibility that we all love to talk about,” Virola said.

In an earlier forum, Medalla said the government’s ability to come up with credible statistics remains unreliable due to the lack of funding and autonomy of its statistical agencies.

Medalla said while the government has announced that its GDP in 2007 was a 31-year high at 7.3 percent, this is not exactly accurate, since it does not corroborate the results of the FIES and the latest poverty statistics.

He noted the average growth rate of the PCE from 2004 to 2006 was the highest in the last 20 years, but the growth rate of GNI net of taxes or GNP adjusted for changes in the international terms of trade and taxes, was the lowest during the last 10 years.

“The national income accounts show the highest growth rates of GDP and personal consumption after 2000. The FIES show the opposite trends. The FIES shows that these are the worst periods for consumer consumption but the PCE and GDP show that it’s the best periods for consumption,” Medalla said.

“The growth rate of real BIR collections is more correlated with the growth rate of FIES Income than the growth rate of GDP,” he added.

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