Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Fixing statistics

I'm often tempted to look at charts and statistics and assume that numbers from one country are comparable to those from other countries. Turns out I probably wasn't paying enough attention when I was studying statistics. Here's an example.

Getting bigger

Mexico's recent accounting revision… involves a big jump. After a new methodology was introduced in 2008, official GDP figures were boosted by nearly 15%. In 2007, the latest year for which both old and new indices are available, income per head was equivalent to $9,694 per year, not $8,445 as the old method suggested.

The old methodology was revised in 1993 but drawn up as long ago as 1980, when Mexico’s economy “was like Russia’s: all oil and corruption,” according to Luis de la Calle, an economist. The new formula gives due importance to services and to trade. It adopts the economic classification system shared by the United States and Canada, breaking the economy down into 750 different activities, rather than 362 as before.

But even the new method may underestimate Mexico’s output…

Other official data suggest Mexicans eat about twice as much meat as they did in 1990, and visit the cinema four times as often, while retail square-footage has more than tripled since 1993. These apparent improvements are not reflected in the statistics. “Who do you think is right: the intellectuals, or Wal-Mart?” asks Mr de la Calle.

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Labels: comparative methodology, economics, Mexico