Economy Minister Bohdan Danilishyn has said the Cabinet of Ministers has canceled norms obliging the State Statistics Committee to calculate and publish GDP indexes each month because monthly GDP indexes were lacking correctness.
The economy minister told this to Ukrainian News.
According to Danilishyn, monthly indexes of the GDP gave only rough picture, as they did not take into consideration a number of indexes.
The minister said the monthly calculation of the GDP were grounded on production indexes of only major sectors, like the farming sector, industry, construction, transport and wholesale trade, or 60 percentof information required for proper calculation of the GDP indexes.
According to Economy Minister Bohdan Danilishyn, the quarterly calculation of GDP indexes corrected the data by billions in the hryvnia.
“The revision of operational data of monthly reports in the quarterly reporting gave billions of hryvnias,” Danilishyn said.
According to him, the incorrectness of the monthly GDP indexes made the analysis of the situation more complicated, as well as further forecasting.
“This was the reason why the decision has been endorsed to cancel monthly calculation of GDP, as most countries have done, as the monthly calculation does not give an objective picture of the situation,” the minister said.
Meanwhile, Economy Minister Danilishyn admitted the ministry was calculating the dynamics of the GDP on its own.
According to him, the estimation of the Economy Ministry is often different to that from the State Statistics Committee.
He said the Economy Ministry will draw up its own indexes of GDP for January 2009 by February 23.
As Ukrainian News earlier reported, the Cabinet of Ministers on February 12 canceled norms obliging the State Statistics Committee to calculate and publish GDP indexes each month.
Oleksandr Shlapak, the first deputy head of the Secretariat of President Viktor Yuschenko, has said that the move represented an attempt of the Cabinet of Ministers to conceal from Ukrainian people the true situation in the social and economic sector and to delay introduction of amendments to the national budget for 2009.
