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REPRESENTATIVES from various government agencies and the
donor community urged the National Statistical
Coordination Board (NSCB) to look into the viability of
other options to rid the Philippine System of National
Accounts (PSNA) of data issues, and ease the agency’s
problems with manpower and funding.
In an
open forum at the World Bank Assessment of the PSNA,
participants urged the NSCB to focus on migrating its
system to System of National Accounts 1993 (SNA 1993),
the globally accepted standard for computing economic
growth, and pooling its staff to focus on just one goal,
which is migrating to SNA 93.
Bangko
Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) consultant Gilbert Valdepeñas
Jr. also recommended that the NSCB seek BSP funding to
help it come up with quality statistics. During the open
forum, Valdepeñas said the BSP may be amenable to this
given that the central bank is constantly in search of
better statistics to use in monetary policymaking.
Valdepeñas said this would be a better option
particularly when the Department of Budget and
Management refuses to grant the NSCB a bigger budget or
stops it from hiring additional employees as part of the
state’s cost-cutting.
“There
may be a way out if you [NSCB] are prepared to migrate
to Chained Value Measures [CVM, which is a better means
to measure real economic growth]. You can present this
to the Monetary Board,” Valdepeñas said during the
discussion.
NSCB
Assistant Secretary-General Estrella Domingo said the
agency will include this in the statistical roadmap that
it is creating, together with the World Bank. She also
said the NSCB is already in the process of evaluating
its own processes and options to improve the PSNA.
In the
draft assessment provided by World Bank’s Consultant
Ross Harvey, the PSNA was hounded by data quality
problems; the NSCB, meanwhile, was reported to be in
dire need of manpower and new equipment. Harvey said
that just before he conducted an assessment, one of the
two servers of the NSCB crashed; its office computers
were already eight years old.
“The
NSCB is in a difficult position. (It has) source data
issues and quality concerns with the (national income)
accounts and (it has experienced a) severe loss of staff
resources,” Harvey said.
Among
the data issues faced by the PSNA, said Harvey, are
limited price indexes such as wage rate indexes and
producer price indexes for other industries; statistical
discrepancies that involve large and variable issues for
both current and constant prices; issues on the
expenditure measure of GDP; inconsistencies with
Input/Output Tables for 2000; and a limited range of
seasonally adjusted series published.
Furthermore, Harvey said the PSNA failed to adopt SNA93
and migrate to CVM. These, Harvey said, are crucial in
coming up with improved and more accurate economic data.
On the
administrative issues, Harvey’s assessment showed the
NSCB lost 60 percent of its national accounts staff, the
group that computes the country’s economic growth.
In 2002,
the national accounts staff had 40 members but this was
reduced to 33 by 2006; and in 2008, there were only 19
staff members. “[The] Economic Statistics Office in NSCB
has suffered a very significant decrease in staff
resources over the last few years,” Harvey said.
The NSCB
had proposed to the DBM the possibility of adding at
least 27 staff members under a short-term
rationalization plan and around 43 more under a
long-term rationalization plan. This request, however,
has yet to be approved by the DBM. |
